
Issue 11
© Solarflare Communications 2014
45
Solarflare Server Adapter
User Guide
3.7 Unattended Installations
Building Drivers and RPMs for Unattended Installation
Linux unattended installation requires building two drivers:
• A minimal installation Solarflare driver that only provides networking support. This driver is
used for network access during the installation process.
• An RPM that includes full driver support. This RPM is used to install drivers in the resultant Linux
installation.
Figure 6: Unattended Installation RPM
shows how the unattended installation process works.
1
Build a minimal Solarflare driver needed for use in the installation kernel (Kernel A in the
diagram above). This is achieved by defining “sfc_minimal” to rpmbuild. This macro disables
hardware monitoring, MTD support (used for access to the adapters flash), I2C and
debugfs
.
This results in a driver with no dependencies on other modules and allows networking support
from the driver during installation.
# as normal user
$ mkdir -p /tmp/rpm/BUILD
$ rpm -i sfc-<ver>-1.src.rpm
$ rpmbuild -bc -D 'sfc_minimal=1' -D 'kernel=<installer kernel>' \
/tmp/rpm/SPECS/sfc.spec
2
The Solarflare minimal driver
sfc.ko
can be found in
/tmp/rpm/BUILD/sfc-<ver>/
linux_net/sfc.ko.
Integrate this minimal driver into your installer kernel, either by
creating a driver disk incorporating this minimal driver or by integrating this minimal driver
into initrd.
3
Build a full binary RPM for your Target kernel and integrate this RPM into your Target (Kernel
B).