PCMCIA

[Chris]

Anyone ever successfully booted DRBL using a PCMCIA network card? When I try, it falls back to busybox and says the kernel doesn't have a driver for my network adapter. However, when I use a PCI one with the PCMCIA one as a second NIC, the PCMCIA one works fine.

[Steven Shiau]

Unless your PCMCIA card supports PXE, otherwise it won't work.
Maybe it's possible to try ipxe/gpxe, but I have never done this.

Steven.

[Chris]

I've got PXE booting working (with netboot + packet driver), but not DRBL. As I said, it falls back to busybox, so the Linux boot is failing. My guess is DRBL is trying to mount the NFS shares before PCMCIA devices are available.

[Steven Shiau]

So did you modify the initrd to make PCMCIA device starts first, then mount the NFS root?

Steven.

[Chris]

No. I was just looking at mkpxeinitrd-net trying to figure out how to do that.

[Chris]

I've made progress. I added these lines to mkpxeinitrd-net:

mkdir -p $initrd/lib/modules/$kernel_ver/kernel/drivers/pcmcia
cp -a /lib/modules/$kernel_ver/kernel/drivers/pcmcia/*.ko $initrd/lib/modules/$kernel_ver/kernel/drivers/pcmcia
ls -l $initrd/lib/modules/$kernel_ver/kernel/drivers/pcmcia

Now I can see my PCMCIA card is loaded, but only after dropping to busybox. How do I force it to load the PCMCIA card first or delay mounting the NFS root a few seconds?

[Chris]

It works!

I had to get the pcmcia NET drivers loaded as well as the pcmcia drivers in mkpxeinitrd-net:

echo "Use kernel modules from $drbl_kernel_mod_path/lib/modules/$kernel_ver."
mkdir -p $initrd/lib/modules/$kernel_ver/kernel/drivers/pcmcia
cp -a /lib/modules/$kernel_ver/kernel/drivers/pcmcia/*.ko $initrd/lib/modules/$kernel_ver/kernel/drivers/pcmcia
mkdir -p $initrd/lib/modules/$kernel_ver/kernel/drivers/net/pcmcia
cp -a /lib/modules/$kernel_ver/kernel/drivers/net/pcmcia/*.ko $initrd/lib/modules/$kernel_ver/kernel/drivers/net/pcmcia

then I had to delay bringing up the network interface until the PCMCIA NIC could be initialized in linuxrc-or-init:

sleep 5
$echo "Loading network device modules..."

then run mkpxeinitrd-net and good to go!

[Steven Shiau]

Cool! Thanks for sharing that.

Steven.