On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 01:11:58PM -0500, Jolynn Schmidt wrote: > > I am currently in a situation where I am testing a piece of hardware that > is experimental and not currently support by any SL version, or upstream > linux version for what it is worth. The manufacture has sent me a cd with > the driver but given that it is a disk controller I have a bit of a chicken > and egg problem. This seems to be a common theme for me, it seems that I > often find myself in this situation and would like to just roll my own > version of the kernel and initrd that I can use during PXE so I can add > drivers as needed. Is there a good document on this process? It seems > like the last time I tried this there were issues around md5 check sums. >
Hmm... but you did not describe your problem? I think I understand what you are doing and all of it should work just fine with SL6 (it works just fine with SL5 and SL4): - booting the SL kernels using PXE, with NFS-Root or without - adding custom drivers to the initrd booted by PXE - booting SL userland using custom Linux kernels, booted from PXE or local disk. If you have an experimental disk controller that you want to eventually boot from, I would suggest that you boot using PXE and NFS-Root, fiddle with your driver until it works. *then* you can go back to trying to add it to the initrd (so the the disks on this controller are visible at boot time), trying to mount the "/" partition from this disk, and very last, try to boot the linux kernel from it. What exactly are you doing that does not work? -- Konstantin Olchanski Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow! Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada
