[RFC] missing net drivers in 8.04+ initrd...

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 06:59:18PM +0200, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> hi,
> Am Montag, den 04.08.2008, 17:10 +0100 schrieb Matt Zimmerman:
> > On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 12:41:07PM +0100, Daniel J Blueman wrote:
> > > There are some key network card drivers not included in the initrd
> > > shipped on the Ubuntu 8.04 (and later) ISO images; this prevents
> > > NFS-root booting the liveCD (either unpacked or serving the squashfs
> > > file from the ISO), and needs extra (unhelpful) steps for NFS-root
> > > booting after installation.
> > > 
> > > Most useful drivers are already there, but in the last year or so
> > > we've seen others become available and this default list hasn't been
> > > updated accordingly. Above this, there are drivers for 10-gig net
> > > cards and some other hardware (eg older Sun SPARC systems) which will
> > > be almost never used in practise (eql, s2io, myri10g, sunhme,
> > > sungem_phy).
> > > 
> > > I'm stuck for suggestion about exactly what package/mechanism to file
> > > this against in LP for Intrepid Ibex, so would appreciate any
> > > wisdom...
> > 
> > This list is currently hardcoded in the initramfs-tools package
> > (/usr/share/initramfs-tools/hook-functions).  There is probably a case to be
> > made for this being maintained in the kernel packages instead, though, so
> > that it can be kept in sync with new drivers when they are added.
> > 
> > Thus, probably something to raise with the kernel team.
> 
> how about solving it dynamically by just pulling the listing of
> available modules with a clever find/ls command syntax from
> the /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/ dir instead of keeping it hardcoded ? 

Because I don't think we want *every* network driver, just a sensible
subset.

I don't expect much netbooting over appletalk or HAM radio, for example.
It's OK to require some extra initramfs configuration for such weird cases,
but the default should be to include classes of device commonly used for
netbooting (like Ethernet).

-- 
 - mdz