Slackware-14.1 ChangeLog (2013-03-12)

Tue Mar 12 06:59:27 UTC 2013

Here we go with some more updates… a few notes on them are in order.
For this kernel update I decided to go with 3.7.10. Yeah, the 3.7 series
is EOL, but I've heard about some broken drivers in 3.8.x that make me
hesitate to push forward. Another option might be to move to 3.4.x, which
is working on my machine finally (a clocksource bug was crashing it with
earlier versions). The USB host and usb-storage drivers are now modular
in both the huge and generic kernels to avoid an issue where a USB stick
could be assigned /dev/sda when running the huge kernel. The brcmsmac
driver for Broadcom wifi is built. However, this takes over for any
Broadcom card that it can support – those cards will no longer be supported
by the b43 driver. So, if you're currently using b43 and find that it no
longer works, you'll need to move to the brcmsmac driver instead. It's
technically possible to build these with the overlapping support, but it's
a mess that way which is probably why nobody else is doing that. And finally,
rudimentary UEFI support makes its first appearance in -current in the form
of a bootable USB image called efiboot.img. Still no support in the
installer for setting up elilo, but this will at least get Linux installed
without the need for Legacy BIOS support. Looking into how to set up the
boot support in the installer will be the next order of business, and I
have a few different ideas about the way to go about that… probably
some good material for a discussion on LQ. BTW, a GPT FAT image like this
one is _supposed_ to work as an El-Torito alternate boot image when creating
an ISO image (extra mkisofs options: -eltorito-alt-boot -no-emul-boot
-eltorito-platform 0xEF -eltorito-boot usb-and-pxe-installers/efiboot.img),
but it's mostly not working here. I did get one of these to work when booted
from an ISO, but all the attempts after that failed. Looks like it might be
a problem with the -boot-load-size being detected properly for one magic
EFI image and not for all the others. If anyone is brave or bored enough to
look into that, hints are gratefully accepted. Anyway, that's it for now.
Have fun!
  • isolinux/initrd.img
    This adds support for kernel mode setting video, needed to have any text
    output with some UEFI implementations. If you need to bypass this, use
    the “nomodeset” option at the boot prompt.
    Terminus fonts were added to avoid small KMS text (bypass with “nofont”).
    USB host and usb-storage modules were added since those are no longer built
    into the huge kernels.
    The hv_storvsc.ko module was added to support installing in Hyper-V.
  • news/2013/03/12/slackware-14.1-changelog.txt
  • Last modified: 9 years ago
  • by Giuseppe Di Terlizzi