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Old 01-21-2008, 10:39 AM   #1
srainville
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Registered: Jan 2008
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Building custom kernel with support for exotic ethernet card


Hi,

First of all, what I'm trying to do is a network install of Ubuntu. The problem is that the default kernel doesn't support the NIC card of the clients. I got the driver(source) from Realtek. The NIC model is RTL8101E, a new gigabit card. My first attempt to solve the problem was to compile the driver as a module and somehow load the module by passing parameters to the kernel at startup. Sounds like that's not possible.

2nd attempt -> build a custom kernel along with the driver I got from Realtek. The problem is... I couldn't figure out how to do it.

How is that supposed to be done?

Thanks in advance,
Sebastien
 
Old 01-21-2008, 12:15 PM   #2
osor
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Registered: Jan 2006
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For option 1, what you would normally do is put the module into an initrd and load it there (I think this should work over a network install). Up until the driver is loaded, the BIOS-compatibility version should be used (i.e., PXE).

For option 2, what you need is a driver that was specifically written as both an external module and a builtin kernel object. Most third-party drivers are written as external modules. Some are also written as patches to the kernel source. If your driver does not have a patch, you will have to convert it yourself. It should not be too hard, but it is somewhat tedious.
 
  


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