Re: Loading device firmware in kickstart

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John Summerfield wrote:
If you want this working during the install, I am not surprised what you do doesn't work.

Me neither really, but you gotta try the easy way first...

I'm assuming you are booting local media, USB disk, CD or similar.

Actually a hard drive partition. Basically we have a "maintenance" partition that we place on each system that can be booted off to re-kickstart the system. This allows us both to reinstall a scragged system, but also do major upgrades that are too complicated to deal with at a multi-user level in an unattended environment.

The later need, which is almost never used, will probably be mitigated somewhat by Fedora's capabilities of running OS version upgrades via yum.

What I would do is explore what the existing scripts do for an installed system, and write and equivalent script to run in %pre.

That's a good idea - thank you. Don't know how easy it would be to get the "udevd" junk to work there, but it's worth a try.

It's a couple of years or more since I looked at this, but as I recall it's fairly simple:
echo something>somehere to say you want firmware loaded.
cat firmware >somewhereelse
echo somethingelse >somewhere to say firmware loading's done.

Or try that, which apparently is what the "udevd" stuff ultimately does from my reading.

The trick is in finding out what to plop where. You don't really need all that general-purpose hardware detection stuff.

True, very true, though we have a (relatively small) variety of hardware we have to support so we do need some auto-detection.

Since this seems like a bit of work, and Atheros cards are easy to come by, I'm going to punt and try using an Atheros based cards (which are an alternative we have to the Intel 2200) and inject "madwifi" drivers into the "initrd". The hard part there will be getting the modules to compile for the "2.6.18-1.2798.fc6" kernel, that or redo the "modules.cgz" with all new modules for a later kernel.

Unfortunately I haven't done this for a while and FC6 is a bit of a learning curve. It used to be easier because you could just use the "BOOT" kernel config - I have no idea where this is pulled no (it appears perhaps to be a generic i586 kernel in "boot.iso" - at least generic i586 modules seem to work with it for versioning).

Thanks for your help and good advice John,

			- Matt
--
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Matt Fahrner                                    2 South Park St.
Chief Systems Architect                         Willis House
Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse               Lebanon, N.H.  03766
Tel: (603) 448-4100 x5150                       USA
Fax: (603) 443-6190                             Matt.Fahrner@xxxxxxxx
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