Installing Debian amd64 on an asus P5W DH Deluxe + E6600 : kernel on installer broken + bugs in d-i when changing kernel + modules
Please CC me when anwsering: I'm not suscribed.
OK I knew this would be painful although I've installed debian on
hundred of machines over the past ten years. No deception on this point.
At least I will report the actual status and seek for advices for
finishing. What I did so far:
1) Took a knoppix 5.01 DVD booted it. Works like a charm except the X
nv driver. Defaults to vesa after some trials. Unfortunately kernel is
2.6.15 and I need a SKY2 ethernet driver for my dual marvell Gigabit
ethernet onbaord + I want to run in 64 bit mode. At least I noted the
drivers used by doing an lsmod.
2) Downloaded
ftp://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/installer-amd64/20061022/images/gtk-miniiso
burned it and booted it. Starts well but hangs after a while because of
spurious interrupts related to disk activities (SATA) endless reset of
controller. Have also spurious irq listed in dmesg. Did not know if a
kernel was correctly running on this mtherboard + CPU combination. So
tried to find another instable AMD64 distrib.
3) Downloaded the brand new opensuze 10.2 beta1 ISO because it includes
almost all the up-to-date stuff. Booted installer. Works like a charm
kernel wise.
3) Downloaded 2.6.19-rc3-git5, configured it with all needed drivers IN
+ SMP. Made a modules_install to get the module directory. Then replaced
the kernel, replaced the /lib/modules by the correct modules directory
in initrd.img, rebuild the CD iso. Booted it. Boots fine, no freeze,
detected almost all hardware part necessary to installation (network,
disks, DVD,s, ...). Unfortunately d-i fails with a series of error when
trying to load evdev modules (that I have'nt because its compiled in).
Found the scripts that tries to load the modules and saw that it is
called like "modprobe -q evdev ||true" so do not know why it loops with
an error.
So now I have some questions because I do not want to explore all the
dead ends by myself if other s have already gone struggling this path.
1) Did anybody else tried to replace a kernel with all drivers build in?
Why did the "modprobe -q evdev ||true" fail? Has it anything to do with
SMP support as the shell will probably spawn the two child on different
proc but should receive exit status as on UP? Sound like a bug in d-i
isn't it?
2) If I recompile my kernel with all code as modules actually loaded
with modprobe by d-i, will it have a change to work? I personnaly would
prefer to comment all the modprobe in the scripts...
3) Shall I build the kernel without SMP? Is the installer known to be
broken when using SMP kernel?
PS : the documentation to make the kind of trick like in 3) above is
rather sparse. Finding the right cpio command to rebuild the initrd
image is rather difficult! and the mkisofs command also. Annd no I do
not want to use the debvian scripts like bootcd or initrd-tools because
its not convenient in my case.
-- eric
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