Hello all, Although my question is specific to the Raspberry Pi, I can imagine anyone who has specific network cards- or hardware requiring firmware during installation- asking this question.
I have a Raspberry Pi Model A, which does not contain onboard Ethernet. In order to get a network connection, I use a USB dongle which is supported by the urtwn device driver. When I boot an install kernel, my urtwn hardware is recognized, but the interface cannot be brought up because the firmware is missing. This prevents me from reliably continuing an install; as of at least yesterday, mounting devices in the RPI kernel is broken (will file a PR in the next few hours if I can't duplicate the issue in the current HEAD), so grabbing local sets from a mounted drive is impossible. According to http://www.daemon-systems.org/man/urtwn.4.html, the firmware for urtwn needs to be installed in /libdata/firmware/if_urtwn/rtl8192cfw.bin when bringing up a network interface. So far, I have not found a way to customize install images to add the firmware into the install image/ramdisk by reviewing the source over the past hour. In fact, I have not found any information in manual pages or the mailing list about whether there is a documented way of adding firmware or extra files to an installation, beyond having the option to choose MAKEDEV targets in the obsolete i386 bootfloppy-tiny floppies. Editing $SRC_ROOT/distrib/evbarm/instkernel/sshramdisk/mtree.conf seems to be the way to add the relevant directory into the ramdisk. However, is there a way to tell ./build.sh or the Makefiles to add the relevant firmware as well into these directories? Is modifying the source to sysinst (which I know can be used to change the default kernel's name in the install prompt) the only way of adding this feature? Again, thanks for any help anyone can give me! Sincerely, William D. Jones
