Add NIC Driver into Installation Media

[meepmeep24]

Hi,

We require that when we install from a older CentOS 7.1 installation media that the NIC drivers for our new X553 NICs (Intel C3558 CPU) be recognized at time of installation not after installation. We have the Intel NIC driver update (ixgbe.ko) built. Can I patch this driver into the Installation media somehow so my NICs are seen during installation?

Regards,
Todd

[TrevorH]

CentOS 7.1 is old and unmaintained and unsupported. Don't use it. It contains many unfixed high severity security vulnerabilities and is unsafe to use. The 7.4 kernel already contains support for the two pci device ids I found in /usr/share/hwdata/pci.ids

Code: Select all

$grep -i 8086 /lib/modules/3.10.0-693.2.2.el7.x86_64/modules.* | grep -i -E "15c4|15ce"
/lib/modules/3.10.0-693.2.2.el7.x86_64/modules.alias:alias pci:v00008086d000015CEsv*sd*bc*sc*i* ixgbe
/lib/modules/3.10.0-693.2.2.el7.x86_64/modules.alias:alias pci:v00008086d000015C4sv*sd*bc*sc*i* ixgbe

[meepmeep24]

Thank you for the reply. Our customer cannot update at this time. Is there a way to patch in the ixgbe NIC driver into the Installation media?

[meepmeep24]

I think I know what I need to do in order to patch the ixgbe.ko kernel module into the CentOS 7 installation media. I want to uncompress initrd.img located in the root directory of CentOS media, overwrite the existing ixgbe.ko file in the initrd.img with the new ixgbe.ko, recompress initrd.img, and copy the new initrd.img back to the installation media and boot. I uncompress the initrd.img from by "Ubuntu" host with:
# xz -dc < initrd.img | cpio --quiet -i –make-directories

I have tried different commands with xz and cpio to recompress the uncompressed files back into a new initrd.img but the resulting initrd.img file seems to double in size and when I try to boot from the new media I get some errors that prevent the boot media from going into installation GUI.
Right now I am uncompressing the initrd.img file with the command above. Then I just want to recompress it right away (without patching) to see if I can boot my new initrd.img file but I get some strange errors on boot up.

Can someone give me the proper command to recompress the initrd.img files back into an initrd.img file?

Regards,
Todd