Novell ZENWORKS LINUX MANAGEMENT 7.3 IR2, Administration Manual

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656 Novell ZENworks 7.3 Linux Management Administration Guide
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If you want to simply include a new hardware driver or kernel module in the imaging operating
system, an easier process might be to copy the
.ko
file into the
/dirstruct/linux/suse/i386-
9.2/modules/
directory. Then, the imaging operating system automatically loads any
.ko
files that
are in this directory.
F.5 Adding or Updating LAN Drivers
As LAN card manufacturers develop and release new LAN adapters, they usually release new or
updated drivers as well. Sometimes the new LAN card functions properly with an earlier driver, and
sometimes the earlier driver does not recognize the new LAN card and refuses to load. Occasionally,
the older driver does load, but the LAN card exhibits serious performance problems. To obtain the
full performance capabilities of a new LAN card, you should use the new driver.
The following sections explain how to obtain or compile drivers:
Š Section F.5.1, “Obtaining Drivers,” on page 656
Š
Section F.5.2, “Building Drivers,” on page 656
If you need to load your drivers with specific parameters, see Section F.5.3, “Loading Drivers with
Parameters,” on page 658 .
F.5.1 Obtaining Drivers
New LAN drivers should be obtained from the manufacturer. Most LAN card manufacturers have
drivers available for free downloading from their Web site. Some drivers are available from
www.scyld.com/network, and the source to the Broadcom BCM5700 driver can be downloaded
from http://www.broadcom.com/drivers/downloaddrivers.php.
If a manufacturer has a binary driver compiled specifically for the kernel version used by
ZENworks, you can obtain the driver and use one of the update methods to add the driver. If the
driver is not for this specific version, you must obtain the source and compile it for this version. For
more information, see
Section F.5.2, “Building Drivers,” on page 656 .
F.5.2 Building Drivers
Nearly all Linux drivers are distributed in source code form and need to be compiled before they can
be used. Follow the manufacturer’s instructions included with the new driver to build the driver
module. Many drivers can be built in such a way that they are built into the kernel itself; however,
we recommend that LAN drivers be built as external kernel modules.
When building your LAN drivers, make sure that your build machine uses the same kernel as the
imaging environment. If you have a LAN driver that doesn’t load in your imaging environment, it
usually means that you have a mismatch between your build environment and the imaging
environment.
You can find the current kernel version of your Linux environment using the following command:
uname -r
However, you might need to modify the results from the
uname
command to get your kernel
versions to match. For more information, see Section F.6, “Using Uname,” on page 658 .