Re: resc2880.bin

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> > I was very pleased to be able to boot the system and do the base install
> > from CD without resorting to floppy images.  Things seemed to work well
> > except for the following;
> > 
> > When the install got to the "modules" section, several errors were
> > reported about modprobe but the messages were covered up by the menu.
> 
> Ok, we'll check this.

I ran into this when modifying the slink boot-floppies to use 2.2 kernel. [1]
Here's a rundown of the problem:

- A 2.2 kernel has kmod enabled. Seems like a good idea in general.
- At several points in the install, devices are accessed that the kernel
  doesn't have drivers for. I think this included /dev/hdd and some other
  stuff.
- kmod tries to load a module via modprobe. No module exists of course.
- modprobe outputs an error message to the console.

Fixing this is a little tricky. The choices seem to be:

- Disable kmod. Ok for the install process, perhaps, but this is something
  we really need in our default kernel.
- Make these messages go to somewhere else. This would seem to involve
  changing the console to be tty2 on the boot floppies. Doing that breaks a
  lot of stuff though.
- Hack around it. My hack was to echo "" > /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe
  This makes kmod not run modprobe, but now it tries to run "" instead.
  It realizes there is no such program, and printk()'s an error message.
  The error message goes to console, but can be trapped by changing the
  severity of kernel message that goes to console, or by including a small
  kmod daemon on the rescue disk.
- Hm, just thought of another workaround: Include a stub modprobe command on
  the rescue disk that does nothing.

-- 
see shy jo

[1] I'm glad I was able to put this to some use, when some people said my
    efforts were'nt going to help debian at all.