Arch Linux

closet geek

Member

Registered: 2007-02-20

Posts: 27

Downgrading a kernel

Hi,

I'm new to arch, but not Linux. Due to arch's use of the very latest kernel the drivers for my usb wireless adapter haven't caught up yet. I have been using a CVS snapshot of the drivers today but five kernel panicks later I think the two don't really mix yet. I would like to therefore continue to use the stable release of these drivers but that release doesn't compile for arch's current kernel. Hence my need to run a previous release and not to have pacman ask to upgrade the kernel. How achievable is this in arch and where would I go to get older kernels? I don't have many options as I've only just installed arch so I can't look in the pacman cache for previous kernels.

What should I be aware of e.g. initrd?

Thanks,

cg

chaosgeisterchen

Member

From: Kefermarkt, Upper Austria

Registered: 2006-11-20

Posts: 550

Re: Downgrading a kernel

To retrieve an older kernel you could simply download it [1] and then install it with

pacman -U $path/to/file

.

[1] - ftp://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/suns … pkg.tar.gz

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celestary
Intel Core2Duo E6300 @ 1.86 GHz
kernel26
KDEmod current repository

closet geek

Member

Registered: 2007-02-20

Posts: 27

Re: Downgrading a kernel

Thank you, that was simpler than I expected. Unfortunately my original problem remains. I have to use CVS versions of this driver with any kernel except the 2.6.16(!) kernel. At which point I still can't use the driver due to that kernel having been compiled with GCC 4.0. Even editing the version magic info isn't much use as then I wont be able insert the nvidia kernel module or anything else.

I guess I should try to get onto the driver writers to see if I can help debug the kernel panic. I know this driver can be rock solid as it is in every other distro I've used (where it comes with all stock kernels, any way for me to request it in the arch stock kernel?).

cg

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: Downgrading a kernel

Which driver is it?

closet geek

Member

Registered: 2007-02-20

Posts: 27

Re: Downgrading a kernel

It's the Atmel at76c503a driver from here:

http://at76c503a.berlios.de/

There is this:

http://www.archlinux.org/packages/search/?q=atmel

but they're out of date. I am just checking that this isn't a bug with my xorg.conf the panic has happened everytime I've been downloading something I've assumed that it must be the wifi drivers however I just had the panic when I wasn't downloading something which has made me consider xorg.conf configuration problems. Looking over my xorg.conf I see a mistake with respect to my Nvidia drivers so I'll give it some more time now to see if the panics have gone.

Thanks,

cg

Last edited by closet geek (2007-02-24 16:34:12)

erosa

Member

Registered: 2006-10-17

Posts: 14

Re: Downgrading a kernel

I have the same issue with my Gentoo system. I'm testing Arch within QEMU, and of course, I still can't use a current kernel due to the at76c503a driver On Gentoo, I'm stuck with 2.6.18. I think some users have made some progress with a patch, but I haven't tried this yet. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164659

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Oh boy!