Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5 - VIRTUAL SERVER ADMINISTRATION, Руководство по установке

Страница: 169 / 388

Chapter 13.
151
Updating drivers during installation on
IBM POWER systems
In most cases, Red Hat Enterprise Linux already includes drivers for the devices that make up your
system. However, if your system contains hardware that has been released very recently, drivers
for this hardware might not yet be included. Sometimes, a driver update that provides support for a
new device might be available from Red Hat or your hardware vendor as a
ISO image file
or a
rpm
package
. Both these formats supply all the files that make up the driver update together in a single file.
Often, you do not need the new hardware during the installation process. For example, if you use a
DVD to install to a local hard drive, the installation will succeed even if drivers for your network card
are not available. In situations like this, complete the installation and add support for the piece of
hardware afterward — refer to
Section 23.1, “Driver update rpm packages”
for details of using a driver
update rpm package to add this support.
In other situations, you might want to add drivers for a device during the installation process to support
a particular configuration. For example, you might want to install drivers for a network device or a
storage adapter card to give the installer access to the storage devices that your system uses. You
can use a driver update image file to add this support during installation in one of three ways:
1. place the image file in a location accessible to the installer:
a. on a local IDE hard drive
b. a USB storage device such as a USB flash drive
c. on a FTP, HTTP, or NFS server on your local network (or take note of a location on the
Internet where someone else has placed the image file)
2. create a
driver update disk
by unpacking the image file onto:
a. a CD (if your computer has an IDE optical drive)
b. a DVD (if your computer has an IDE optical drive)
c. a floppy disk
d. a USB storage device such as a USB flash drive
3. create an
initial ramdisk update
from the image file and store it on a PXE server. This is an
advanced procedure that you should consider only if you cannot perform a driver update with any
other method.
If Red Hat, your hardware vendor, or a trusted third party told you that you will require a driver update
during the installation process, choose a method to supply the update from the methods described
in this chapter and test it before beginning the installation. Conversely, do not perform a driver
update during installation unless you are certain that your system requires it. Although installing an
unnecessary driver update will not cause harm, the presence of a driver on a system for which it was
not intended can complicate support.
13.1. Limitations of driver updates during installation
Unfortunately, some situations persist in which you cannot use a driver update to provide drivers
during installation: