Chadley Wilson wrote:
Thanks for the links Filipe, much appreciated.
to Tim, I had another thread where the scenario is that the centos boot disk does not include a critical ATA driver. We (the company where I work) are planning to distribute the discs with the computers we sell. So I need the driver included in the disc in the same fashion we do with our OEM Windows. The problem is that I can get the driver into the initrd.img and you can select it from the list when prompted for installation sources / load driver(select or disc). But this means we can't run the kickstart files from CD because before you can select your CD drivers, you must locate your ks.cfg file or cancel kickstart and load the driver. And I am unfortunately not in the position to be giving every customer a free flash drive to overcome the issue.
To get back to my main objective,
I know I am probably asking the question the wrong way here, but if I compile my driver, do I have to rebuild the kernel to put it in the initrd.img file? Or can I just run mkinitrd?
I frequently rebuild the kernel/installer - mainly to support NICs that are newer than the current CentOS release - as we do NFS installs - which require a working NIC driver to do the install :-)
Rebuilding a CentOS 5 install image is not hard - it basically involves having a copy of the whole distro on disk (with your updated RPMS), installing the anaconda-runtime RPM (plus a few other RPMS associated RPMS) and running /usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/buildinstall with various options to create the installer images.
I've never re-created a set of distro CDs/DVD - but I think that is also quite straight forward once you have an updated disto tree.
The difficult part is getting the additional and/or updated/patched drivers into the kernel you want to use - but the page at http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Custom_Kernel seems to cover that - but you really do need some spec file hacking and SRPM re-building knowledge ...
Feel free to contact me off list if you need further pointers
James Pearson