How to create a driver update CD

Draft

Ubuntu has the ability to use a driver update CD to either supply new drivers or replace older drivers present in the kernel. This page describes step by step how to create this CD and is intended to augment the specifications and documentation by a practical example.

Symptom

A bug in the RealTek RTL-8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver (r8169) may cause a kernel oops during boot of the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Live CD, when an unknown MAC address is encountered. For briefness the triaging and testing for fixes is skipped here.

Patch

A patch that fixes this problem has been sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), see http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/5/13/402.

Packaging

1. out of source module build
2. add Debian packaging information
3. build
4. make sure depmod is run, correct directory is used

Create Driver Update CD

Place debian package on update cd in the directory:

ubuntu-drivers/2.6.24-16-generic

Write CD and use during boot of Live CD.

CategoryKernel