I wanted to install my latest server (Dual-Quad-Xeons and a 5.7TB 3ware 9650SE controller) with Debian Etch. Unfortunately at this moment there was no Debian installation CD with a recent 3w-9xxx driver – so my great RAID controller was not supported. Of course all Debian CDs didn’t find any harddisk 🙁

Now there were two possibilities – a network boot or a customized Debian installation CD. Here I will describe the second option, building your own installation CD.

The latest official Debian kernel at this moment was 2.6.18-3, so I downloaded exactly the following packages:

• linux-image-2.6.18-3-amd64
• linux-headers-2.6.18-3-amd64

This way I needed to simply exchange the included kernel module with my new version. To exchange the 3w-9xxx module, I downloaded the sources from 3ware and built the module. The resulting 3w-9xxx.ko has to be copied over the “old” file which does not know about the 9650SE controller yet. A simple

cp 3w-9xxx.ko /lib/modules/2.6.18-3-amd64/kernel/drivers/scsi/

did it in my case!

A Debian installer CD needs special kernel packages, so called “udebs”. You can build these udebs from an installed kernel, if you download the source of linux-kernel-di-amd64-2.6 with the command

apt-get source linux-kernel-di-amd64-2.6

then you enter the unpacked directory, in my case this was linux-kernel-di-amd64-2.6-1.14 . As I said, I wanted to build/update kernel 2.6.18-3, but the downloaded sources are probably for another/older version. In my case this was 2.6.17-2. To make everything work, you have to change every occurrence of 2.6.17-2 to 2.6.18-3 in the files debian/control and kernel-versions by opening the files with any editor you like. I was using vi and issued the command

:%s/2.6.17-2/2.6.18-3/g

Simply enter dpkg-buildpackage after this and you will find many .udeb files in the parent directory. If dpkg-buildpackage is not available, install the package dpkg-dev . If it breaks after it started, it could need the package kernel-wedge.

Keep the .udeb files, you will need them later!

Now you have to build a recent version of debian-installer. I used the developer version from the subversion repository. To get the sources, give the folllowing command and enter the installer directory afterwards:

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/d-i/trunk/installer installer

Edit the file build/config/amd64.cfg and make sure the KERNELVERSION line shows YOUR kernel version. Also uncomment the word #monolithic in the first line by removing the #. Edit build/config/common and make sure SUITE is set to “testing” or whatever you wish to install later. Copy the .udeb files you created before into the build/localudebs directory,

You should probably copy the original kernel .deb from
/var/cache/apt/archives to /usr/src and also the newly built driver
module to /usr/src, so you can edit build/config/common and make sure
the following line exists:

EXTRAFILES = /usr/src/linux-image-2.6.18-3-amd64_2.6.18-7_amd64.deb /usr/src/3w-9xxx.ko

This way these files will be at the same place in installation environment –
and you should install /copy them before finishing the installation, otherwise the installer has found your
RAID disk, but after you boot into your new system the old kernel would
be active and not recognizing the controller. (To install you can open a shell by selecting one of the last installer menu entries. Your future system can be found in the /target directory. Don’t forget to add your necessary kernel module to be included in your initrd, otherwise the kernel will boot, but then wait endlessly for its root file system. I did that by adding 3w-9xxx to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and then doing a “mkinitramfs -o initrd.img-2.6.18-3-amd64 2.6.18-3-amd64.)

Now enter the build directory and type

make build_monolithic

Should it break because of unmet dependencies, install them. In my case I had to enter this:

apt-get install grep-dctrl bc debiandoc-sgml libbogl-dev glibc-pic libslang2-pic libnewt-pic genext2fs mklibs mkisofs dosfstools syslinux tofrodos mtools bf-utf-source

Should you get an error saying something about weak symbols, try a “make reallyclean” and then a “make build_monolithic” again – it worked for me and I had an ISO image in dest/monolithic .