While we try to solve this signing issue, I have a side question that could get me going with my debugging. In the meantime I've confirmed with the driver maintainer that the problem exists already in the vanilla kernel, but he hasn't changed the driver in a while, so it's some other component of the kernel that now clashes with it. This driver is specific to a certain laptop make/model series, and apparently it affects only newer models of that series as he has an older laptop that has no issues. As such, I'm now stuck debugging this myself, which involves a git bisect on the kernel source repository and a lot of compiling.
As I was looking at documentation to make my life easier (and regardless of if we solve this signing issue or not), I stumbled upon kexec and a useful doc page in the Arch's wiki. Using kexec would let me load an unsigned kernel (according to an answer on stackexchange from a person who does this on his machine) on a machine with secure boot enabled in case we don't solve the signing issue, and it'd spare me from a bunch of reboots anyway. What I haven't been able to figure out, though, is if kexec will only load and boot the monolithic part of the kernel, or if it'll load and start also the kernel modules associated to it (the driver I'll be debugging is compiled as a module). Logic would tell me that it would because otherwise the newly booted kernel may not work properly, but I haven't been able to find a clear answer to this question, and the driver maintainer himself wasn't sure when I asked him because he'd never used kexec before. So, the side question is: can I use kexec to do my debugging and load newly compiled kernels and associated modules without the need to reboot every time? I can always compile a kernel and find out, but if someone has an answer to it already...
As I was looking at documentation to make my life easier (and regardless of if we solve this signing issue or not), I stumbled upon kexec and a useful doc page in the Arch's wiki. Using kexec would let me load an unsigned kernel (according to an answer on stackexchange from a person who does this on his machine) on a machine with secure boot enabled in case we don't solve the signing issue, and it'd spare me from a bunch of reboots anyway. What I haven't been able to figure out, though, is if kexec will only load and boot the monolithic part of the kernel, or if it'll load and start also the kernel modules associated to it (the driver I'll be debugging is compiled as a module). Logic would tell me that it would because otherwise the newly booted kernel may not work properly, but I haven't been able to find a clear answer to this question, and the driver maintainer himself wasn't sure when I asked him because he'd never used kexec before. So, the side question is: can I use kexec to do my debugging and load newly compiled kernels and associated modules without the need to reboot every time? I can always compile a kernel and find out, but if someone has an answer to it already...
Statistics: Posted by iacchi — 2024-08-15 16:06 — Replies 5 — Views 121