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Andor
Asked: 2010-07-24 11:24:41 +0800 CST

How do you install Ubuntu Server with a custom kernel?

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I'm installing Ubuntu Server in a machine that has certain RAID controller not supported by the default kernel. A patch for the kernel has to be downloaded and compiled as a module for this to work.

As this is going to be the booting volume, the module has to be already loaded on install boot for Ubuntu to detect my RAID volume.

I've been thinking that maybe burning a custom install CD or maybe by network install and preseeding a different kernel than the stock one would be OK, but I'm not really sure of the safest/easyest way of doing it.

It's: Ubuntu 10.04 HighPoint RocketRAID 2310 3 SATA drives in a RAID5

raid kernel preseed netinstall

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I had a similar problem with network installs to a server with aic94xx card -- the driver is in the kernel, but its firmware wasn't included into initrd image. I generated another initrd image with missing firmware and loaded it along with standard one, like so:

    "initrd=ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz,ubuntu-installer/amd64/aic94xx-seq.gz"

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  2. I don't know for Ubuntu server in particular, but to boot you need generally an initrd (or initramfs) that will include necessary modules. If as I believe, Ubuntu comes with the Debian initramfs tools, then a standard invocation of "mkinitramfs " should create a proper initrd/iniramfs for your kernel; then you'll need an entry in your grub.cfg for your kernel.

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