Shane, Great writeup. Yes I am very interested in what you have done. This is such a common issue these days. -Connie Sieh On Mon, 6 Dec 2004, Shane Canon wrote: > Greetings, > > I've just finished installing SL on a system with a 3ware 9xxx card in > it. I thought it may be useful to other folks if I shared my > experience. I successfully used two different approaches. I will > describe both... > > Approach 1 - New kernel > > This approach seem the most likely to work, since it would fix both the > install kernel and the boot kernel. In the past I would have modified > the install images by hand, but this time I wanted to use the site > scripts to prepare everything. Here are the steps I took. > > * I created a patch to add the 3w-9xxx driver and a config option to > enable it. I modified the kernel configs and rebuilt the various kernel > RPMs. I then placed these rpms in my site/Updates directory. > > * I modified the hwdata rpm to correct the pcitable. The buildinstall > scripts blows this rpm apart to get the pcitable. The rebuilt rpm goes > in the site/Updates directory. > > * I modified modinfo in the anaconda rpm and rebuild the rpm. The > buildinstall scripts also blows this rpm apart to create the install images. > > * Run build.release.site.sh to create the new install images > > This approach is a little tedious because you wind up having to modify > so many packages. I think we may want to look at modifying anaconda to > pick up pcitable and modinfo files from an extra location to simply > things. It took me a while to figure out that the buildinstall scripts > actually unpacks RPMs to create the various images. I assumed it used > the files already present on the host. However, it just uses these to > get started and most stuff comes from the RPMs. > > Approach 2 - Use DKMS and driverdisk images > > For those not familiar with DKMS, it is a framework for managing kernel > modules outside of the base kernel. It was developed by folks at Dell > to manage drivers for things like Fibre Channel cards. You can find it > here.... http://linux.dell.com/dkms/dkms.html > > DKMS can build the driverdisk for you. So I used it to create the > images. I still was having trouble getting kickstart to use these > images though. It winds up that if anaconda gets the driverdisk over > NFS (and maybe http and ftp) it can't be an msdos image. Once I > repacked the driver disk in cramfs format it worked. I also created an > RPM for the 3ware driver that DKMS uses to build modules for other kernels. > > > If anyone is interested in these modifications, let me know. I'll be > happy to share any of the various RPMs and patches. > > --Shane >