Comments on: Updating RedHat/CentOS Kickstart with new drivers

By: Turned out to be a driver issue by Oscar Gonzalez posted at notagrouch.com

Turned out to be a driver issue by Oscar Gonzalez posted at notagrouch.com — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 09:43:30 +0000

[...] to updating the drivers. So I had to build a new driver, in the same manner that my buddy Steve built a driver for this very same [...]

By: steve

steve — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 03:55:22 +0000

Thanks for the update! I probably need to get a centos 6 kickstart going soon too, so this is very helpful.

By: eburrows

eburrows — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 17:32:25 +0000

Steve,
A great howto, thank you!

However, since your original post, a few things have changed, so here are my updates, learned by trial and error:

1. The initrd.img file is no longer ext2, it is a CPIO archive. So, to extract, do:

gunzip -c initrd.img | cpio -iv

2. To re-create initrd, do:

find .buildstamp .profile * | cpio -H newc -ov | gzip -c > ../initrd-new.img

3. The pcitable file is now named pci.ids, and is in a multi-line format, but is straight-forward.

4. It may be necessary to add the driver pci values to the modules.alias file, which is in a similar format to pci.ids.

5. It may be necessary to add the driver to the module-info file, for pretty output to the user.

I found some help at this URL: http://smshaker.wordpress.com/2009/04/09/adding-network-driver-to-pxe-initrdimg/

Thanks!
– Erik Burrows

By: Adding a new driver to CentOS/RHEL 5.x initrd.img | Kroko

Adding a new driver to CentOS/RHEL 5.x initrd.img | Kroko — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 05:32:20 +0000

[...] Googling around, I couldn’t find much resources or how-tos, the best one was thispost… [...]

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 05:11:34 +0000

Thanks for the writeup, I was just looking into how to update the 3ware driver for the 9650SE RAID CARD in RHEL 5.2 (x86_64) so I’m glad I came across your page. I performed the kickstart driver disk install using your instructions and the install went fine. However, when I checked the driver version, it’s still the same version as the default 3ware driver RHEL 5.2 comes with:

[root@new-host-3 ~]# cat /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/stats
3w-9xxx Driver version: 2.26.02.008

According to 3ware, the driver version should be 2.26.08.004. The only place my method differs from yours is I used http as the source my my driverdisk in the kickstart file:

driverdisk –source=http://192.168.0.119/3waredriverdisk.img

Anaconda didn’t give any errors during the kickstart install, I did not see any errors in the anaconda.log either. Any ideas?

By: Adding network driver to PXE initrd.img … « Sameh M. Shaker’s Weblog

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 08:05:04 +0000

[...] Googling around, I couldn’t find much resources or how-tos, the best one was this post… [...]

By: stevek

stevek — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:25:32 +0000

Great stuff, thanks for documenting all this Steve. I still reference this to remember how the heck we got all this working…