I’ve been late to update to Fedora 12, and I’ve kept my installation at Fedora 11. Oh, but I couldn’t update my kernel either. It seems the following module is to blame:
$ modinfo ssb
filename: /lib/modules/2.6.29.4-167.fc11.i586/kernel/drivers/ssb/ssb.ko
license: GPL
description: Sonics Silicon Backplane driver
srcversion: A3AE34BE4010797EEEB08AF
....
What is ssb.ko? Well, according to Kconfig in the corresponding source directory, it’s probably related to some Broadcom device.
Now that I know the culprit, I can continue the installation. Oh, I installed Fedora 12 by dd(1)ing the ext4 filesystem in LiveOS/ext3fs.img (that itself is in LiveOS/squashfs.img in the LiveCD image) under my old installation of Fedora 11. That allowed me to download and compile the wireless driver (in package kmod-wl) without requiring a cabled network.
So, how to disable the module? In the installed system, just add a line in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. As for when booting, LiveCD or system? Well, by grep(1)ing the contents of the initrd, it’s by using the following parameter: rdblacklist=ssb.
And how did I found out this module was the culprit? Booting with the arguments: udevtrace udevlog init=/bin/bash
I was booted directly to bash, then did: strace -f -e open /sbin/start_udev
udevd will start, serializing the events, and being a little slower, allowing me to see the point of failure.
Now, to migrate the configuration…
