Arch Linux

grimpirate

Member

Registered: 2011-10-26

Posts: 47

Custom Kernel, the ABS, and Archiso

Following the wiki in regards to Archiso I created my own LiveCD with some default applications I would like to have available. Everything went fine, no issues in terms of the Archiso scripts. Specifically, I want to use the LiveCD on a laptop that uses a broadcom wireless card. I've already checked the wiki and relevant documentation and know the card to be supported by the b43-firmware. Furthermore, I know this firmware to work because the laptop currently has an Arch Linux system installed on it, and the PCMCIA card works just fine. However, when I loaded the LiveCD I'd generated, the b43 module does not load, so I rolled it again and added b43.conf to modules-load.d. Now the b43 module does in fact load, but the card goes undetected/unlisted. I tried blacklisting bcma, but that doesn't really do much as b43 loads bcma anyhow. Therefore, the final approach, as suggested by the wiki, was to recompile the kernel with the BCMA_EXTRA condition. Using the ABS, I successfully compiled the kernel with said option. This is the spot where I'm now at a loss.

I renamed the package to linux-bcma-extra, so as to differentiate it from the standard kernel. However, looking at the structure of the LiveCD, there is only one vmlinuz. So, is there some way to get the custom kernel to also appear in the LiveCD (syslinux entries purposely modded to reflect this)? Or should I instead leave the PKGBUILD as is (with pkgname=linux), move my custom repo in pacman.conf up to the top (so that it overrides the standard kernel package with my custom kernel package), and thusly limit myself to only one kernel on the LiveCD?

UPDATE: I modified the build.sh script to use vmlinuz-linux-bcma-extra kernel as opposed to vmlinuz-linux. However, when I tested the ISO it failed catastrophically at some point in the boot sequence.

UPDATE: I recompiled the kernels leaving the original package name, placed the customrepo before core and regenerated the archiso image. Everything booted as expected on a virtual machine, I'll post the results once I've burnt and tested on the actual laptop. As an aside does anyone know of a way to check kernel parameters to ensure that a particular config option is set (so as to verify that CONFIG_B43_BCMA_EXTRA is indeed set)? Or is this not possible once the kernel has been compiled?

UPDATE: The burnt image did not work (in the sense that the PCMCIA card still goes undetected), so at this point I'm out of ideas. Oddly, drive tray ejected during the boot sequence, wherein I had to close it in order to continue booting.

Last edited by grimpirate (2014-08-12 17:02:15)