Thomas, Thanks for replying... For being the _only_ one to reply! As it turns out, this project has already taken place, though not with complete success. More below. On Sunday 11 March 2007 08:34, Thomas Hertweck wrote:
Randall R Schulz wrote:
[...] 1) Specific recommendations on the most expedient way to endow the kernel in openSUSE 10.2 with this USB support. In particular, is it possible to simply load (or build and load) a kernel module to reenable the USB filesystem (known variously as usbfs, usbdevfs, USB_DEVICEFS, or /proc/bus/usb)?
usbfs is not implemented as a separate kernel module. As far as I know, you need to recompile the usbcore module if you want to re-enable usbfs.
That, at least, I discovered / figured out when I ran "make menuconfig" for the first time.
2) Assuming a full kernel rebuild is required, I'd like to get some recommendations for informational resources of a tutorial nature on how to build a late-model kernel with emphasis on anything openSUSE-specific or -related. I found this How-To Forge article: http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_suse. If anyone is familiar with it and can comment on its usefulness, that would be helpful.
Well, I would not really recommend this Howto, but that's just my personal opinion :)
It did not seem to lead me totally astray. I went with the suggestion of creating an RPM (because I was using one computer to do the build but the result was intended primarily for my friend's computer). This is where things fell down, probably because I don't know enough about how kernel RPMs work, what happens when they're installed. How the source RPM is fabricated (in particular, why I can have more than one kernel but apparently only one set of kernel sources installed at any one time). If you know of better resources for newbie kernel builders, I'd love to hear about them.
[...] 1. Install kernel-sources and kernel-syms 2. copy .config and Modules.symvers from /usr/src/linux-obj/<your kernel> to /usr/src/linux 3. make oldconfig 4. make menuconfig, select the usbfs 5. make modules && make modules_install 6. change noauto to auto for the usbfs in fstab 7. reboot 8. ta-da
I think, the following procedure might work (however, it's untested since I do not have a 10.2 installation):
I think it's too minimal for practical purposes, especially if you want to transport the new kernel to another system.
$> cd /usr/src/linux $> make cloneconfig $> vi .config change # USB_DEVICEFS is not set to USB_DEVICEFS=y $> make oldconfig $> make drivers/usb/core/usbcore.ko
I was able to alter the configuration using "make menuconfig" and the kernel, once installed, _did_ have usbfs available. Getting VMware to configure has continued to elude us, however.
and then install this new module (i.e. replace the standard usbcore.ko module in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ with this new one). That should avoid the time-consuming process of compiling all modules (make modules). However, this will only work if all the USB_DEVICEFS functionality is really contained in the usbcore module (I think it is but I am not 100% sure). If not, then you have to re-compile additional modules and a "make modules" might be a safe way to do it. Maybe someone using 10.2 can report which way works best.
Please note that this method is not using a build directory, i.e. it will build the module(s) in place (i.e. in the kernel source tree).
When I ran menuconfig I gave the configuration a variant name, but somehow I still didn't get a new build directory. For reasons I have not yet figured out, the VMware configuration script will not succeed on a system where I installed the resulting kernel RPM and its corresponding source RPM.
Also note that you'll have to go through this procedure again after upgrading a SuSE kernel.
Yeah. That much I knew. I don't know a way around this aspect other than to wait for VMware to catch up with the move away from usbfs. But presumably anything I can do once, I can do again... Presumably. Thankfully, I have a very fast machine, so a kernel recompilation doesn't take all that long.
Cheers, Th.
Again, thanks for taking the time to reply. Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org