[Voyage-linux] Preferred method for compiling external kernel modules in voyage 0.8

[Jon Meek]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Jonathan Polom <jon at spkr.net> wrote:

> I just started using Voyage MPD last week and quite like it, except
> for one flaw I've found: building kernel modules for proprietary
> drivers. The only problem I'm having (and this is not a voyage issue,
> I had the same problem when I ran Debian stable) is that my wired NIC,
> which is a lovely Realtek 8111/8168 series controller, uses the
> problematic r8169 kernel module. The r8169 module is effectively broke
> for my NIC and causes it to up/down the link randomly and drop a lot
> of incoming packets. Obviously this is not acceptable and I need to
> fix it. The accepted fix at this time is to use the r8168 module
> provided by Realtek. Realtek provides the "source" for this driver on
> their web site to be compiled as a kernel module and there's also an
> r8168-dkms package in the Debian sid repos.
>
> So far I've had no success compiling the r8168 module from the Realtek
> tarball or from the DKMS package out of sid (all deps are satisfied
> for that package). I've installed the kernel source for the
> 3.0.0-voyage kernel, untarred it to /usr/src/linux-source-3.0.0-voyage
> and symlinked /usr/src/linux to it, but DKMS consistently claims that
> it doesn't think the source for the kernel is installed when I run
> `dpkg-reconfigure r8168-dkms`. I've tried compiling the module
> directly from the Realtek source via their autorun.sh script, but it
> looks in /lib/modules/3.0.0-voyage/build for something that isn't
> there (not too sure what *should* be there even, I've tried symlinking
> the kernel sources there but that doesn't work either). I've never had
> this much trouble trying to compile a kernel module before, especially
> in Debian.
>
> I searched my configured apt repos (squeeze, sid and voyage) for
> available kernel headers and couldn't find one for the voyage kernel
> (why isn't one available by default? that seems odd, especially so
> since you're offering a kernel source package) since you really don't
> need the full source tree available to compile a module in most cases.
> I did find what looks like a kernel headers package in the voyage
> experimental repository for the 3.0.0-voyage kernel. But I have to
> ask: why is the headers package for the default voyage kernel
> considered experimental? Will that package allow me to compile modules
> against the headers it contains or are there some known issues with
> it?
>
> So my main question here is: How is one supposed to compile a third
> party/out-of-tree kernel module on voyage for the voyage kernel?
>
> Any help is appreciated on this topic.
>
> Jon
>
>
This is how I compiled the e1000e driver from Intel's tarball for
Voyage 0.7.5. Note that this was done to fix an auto-negotiation
problem that was actually due to a bad UTP cable.

Since I did not want to significantly increase the size of my USB
image, I built the driver on my mpd server which is a PC Engines ALIX
board.

On the ALIX board, where some development tools are already installed.

 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get upgrade

 sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

 sudo reboot

Log back in and move to an appropriate directory:

 cd build

 tar zxf ../dist/e1000e-1.6.3.tar.gz

 sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.38-voyage /usr/src/linux

 make

Then grab the compiled driver (mpd:~/build/e1000e-1.6.3/src/e1000e.ko)
and get it to the target system (running USB system).

On the USB system, verify what driver we are using:

 dmesg | egrep e1000e
  [    0.971963] e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - 1.2.20-k2

Backup the original driver:

 sudo cp -pi /lib/modules/2.6.38-voyage/kernel/drivers/net/e1000e/e1000e.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.38-voyage/kernel/drivers/net/e1000e/e1000e.ko.orig

Copy new driver into the modules directory

 sudo cp -p ~/dist/e1000e.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.38-voyage/kernel/drivers/net/e1000e

 sudo /sbin/depmod -a

 sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.38-voyage

 sudo reboot

Log back in and verify that the new version is running:

 dmesg | egrep e1000e
 [    0.886074] e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - 1.6.3-NAPI

Success!

Jon (a different one...)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.voyage.hk/pipermail/voyage-linux/attachments/20111216/e7474310/attachment.html>