Arch Linux

nourathar

Member

From: Bxl

Registered: 2013-04-26

Posts: 109

use binaries from other distro ?

Hello,

apologies for this question if it is stupid, but I could not find an answer..

For a specific piece of hardware, I need to install drivers. The hardware in question is an analog HD video capture card. As far as I know this is the best one available, and one of the reasons to choose it is that there is relatively good Linux support, but unfortunately not open source. The manufacturer makes a range of binaries available for different versions of Debian, Fedora, Raspbian, Redhat, Suse and Ubuntu, but unfortunately not for Arch. I asked, and for 1000,- dollars they are willing to build a driver for Arch. Fair enough, I suppose I can not expect them to work for free, but I have not asked how much support for updates that would include.
From reading about this device, I understood that the driver does quite a bit: a large part of the card is a FPGA (a programmable chip), and I understood that that FPGA is being programmed everytime the driver is initialized. So it entails much more than setting up communications between a card and the rest of the computer, which makes it also more understandable that their driver is not open source.

their Linux download page is here:
https://ssl.epiphan.com/downloads/linux/

Now my question is: would it be possible to somehow wrap the Linux binaries for one of these distributions so that I can use them in Arch ?
If I get the dependencies right and if the Linux kernel is not very different, that should work in theory, no ?
How should I go about it, if it is indeed possible ?
And if that is not possible, why is that ? I am trying to understand how these things work...

thanks very much for any pointers,

Joost.

Mr.Elendig

#archlinux@freenode channel op

From: The intertubes

Registered: 2004-11-07

Posts: 4,092

Re: use binaries from other distro ?

Start a kickstarter/similar project to get a gpl driver made!
<top gear>How hard could it possibly be?</top gear>

Last edited by Mr.Elendig (2015-04-07 14:38:06)

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progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,205

Re: use binaries from other distro ?

You can investigate the Fedora 21 package. It seems like a simple makefile based build without distribution specific changes and Fedora 21 currently has a 3.19.x kernel like arch.
https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/kernel

Last edited by progandy (2015-04-07 14:48:00)

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,808

Re: use binaries from other distro ?

You might look into rpmextract.

But, here is the rub.   These are drivers.  They have to be built against the specific kernel with which they are to be used.   At the very least, the kernel version has to be the same.  The next problem is going to be where in the file system they are placed.  The modules exist under /usr/lib/modules in a directory that is based upon the name of the kernel.  I doubt the tree structure of the rpm will try to place the files in /usr/lib/modules/3.19.2-1-ARCH   (the module directory for the Arch 3.19 kernel)

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Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 11,614

Re: use binaries from other distro ?

You might look into rpmextract.

Please don't. bsdtar will extract RPM files just fine.

nourathar

Member

From: Bxl

Registered: 2013-04-26

Posts: 109

Re: use binaries from other distro ?

thanks for the speedy replies !

following progandy's advice I looked at what is inside the fedora 21 package and that looked a lot less scary than I thought it would look.
I am probably overconfident all of a sudden, but the makefile (which is actually open source itself but does nothing more than putting the blobs in the right places ?) looks rather similar to a PKGBUILD file, so perhaps I could even try to make an AUR package out of it.

What I have to decide now is whether I am going to risk buying a $1000,- card and then find out that I can't get it to work on Arch.
Which would probably mean setting up a double boot with one of the distro's that does work, and that is perhaps also not the end of the world, even though I would like to avoid that.
I did notice that there were 5 different packages for Fedora 20, so the question would then be whether that is the manufacturer updating the firmware, or whether that means that 5 updates were somehow desirable within one or two years. Their packages for Debian were also updated a few times, so perhaps that means that they are more caused by manufacturer restlessness rather than things breaking because of updates ? Or is that wishful thinking ?

J.

Last edited by nourathar (2015-04-07 15:38:07)

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,205

Re: use binaries from other distro ?

Before you buy the card, try to manually load the module with insmod and/or modprobe.

By the way, I had to copy some inline functions from a header into a new source file without inline and static attributes to satisfy all symbol dependencies. Then I was able to insmod it after modprobing videobuf-vmalloc.

Last edited by progandy (2015-04-07 16:09:08)

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nourathar

Member

From: Bxl

Registered: 2013-04-26

Posts: 109

Re: use binaries from other distro ?

that's great advice, I'll have to sit down and read a bit more about kernel modules before I fully understand how to do what you are saying, but I'll be able to figure that out I think.

thanks for your help !