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

[Zenny]

Yeah, I tried like what Jonathan and Jon explained in 0.8, but failed
miserably. I want to roll back to the standard kernel what squeeze
officially supports, and trying to install the 2.6.32-6 kernel has
been a pain in the ass for the last few days.

Actually, there is no clear documentation on how to use SDK and that
confused me a while.

On 12/16/11, Jonathan Polom <jon at spkr.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 9:43 AM, Jon Meek <meekjt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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...)
>>
>
> Did you have to configure additional apt repositories to find the
> linux-headers package? I did an apt-cache search headers and didn't
> find any header packages for the voyage kernel, only the debian
> kernels. I'm using voyage 0.8 if that matters which uses the
> 3.0.0-voyage kernel. The appropriate headers package would be
> linux-headers-3.0.0-voyage and that doesn't seem to exist. From
> memory, I have the squeeze repos, voyage repos and sid repos (for the
> r8168-dkms package) in sources.list. I will downgrade if necessary as
> I don't require bleeding edge anything for this device.
>
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