Hi Lennart On 10/05/19, Lennart Sorensen (lsore...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca) wrote: > On Thu, May 09, 2019 at 07:22:30AM +0100, Rory Campbell-Lange wrote: > > Target systems have A2SDi-8C-HLN4F motherboards each with 4 no. Intel > > x553 NICs. > > > > The stable netinstall ixgbe module does not load the interfaces, even > > when modprobed by hand. > > > > Buster netinstall 20190429-03:57 works fine. However I can't find a way > > of downgrading the installation to "stable", as suggested at > > > > https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/FAQ#Q:_How_can_I_install_sid_.28unstable.29_with_DebianInstaller.3F > > It suggests the exact opposite. It suggests you can install stable and > then upgrade to unstable. You can't downgrade. It doesn't suggest that > at all. Never could. It suggests that people that want unstable can > use the working stable installer and upgrade to unstable rather than > try the potentially broken installer in testing. Of course if stable > isn't working on your hardware, then installing stable is very very hard.
That makes complete sense. > > I've tried expert mode in both console and graphical mode. > > > > I'm not sure if the inability to downgrade the installation is a bug or > > policy. If the former I'm happy to report it. > > It's a matter of reality. Packages can support upgrading from previous > versions because they know what previous versions existed and how they > worked. An old package can't downgrade from something that didn't exist > when it was made. It doesn't make any logical sense. Agreed. > > Tips on compiling the ixgbe module for stable on a machine with only a > > BMC and no NICs gratefully received; else how to downgrade a testing > > netinstall to stable. > > Compiling a kernel module tends to only work for the kernel version > it was meant for, so the kernel in stable likely is too old for your > hardware and a newer module won't compile for it. A newer kernel (like > the backport kernel) might work though. > > I would think the simplest method to install would be > to get a supported USB or PCIe network card, use that to > install and then install the backport kernel, or possibly > use the out of tree ixgbe driver from intel as per > https://gist.github.com/DisasteR/db93d2db1ea82ecbc92a46eff3031b4f#install-ixgbe-module-with-dkms-support I've finally dealt with it by doing this: * installing from testing netboot * using expert mode to move to the 'stable' distribution * choosing to add backports to the package list * rebooting at the end of the install process into rescue mode * installing the 4.19.0-0.bpo.4-amd64 from backports after mounting /, /boot and /boot/efi and re-running grub-install (I expect I could have done this without rebooting into rescue mode if I understood how to use apt-get during the installation process). All is now working as desired. Thank you very much for your comments. Regards Rory For the benefits of posterity my complete setup was: [dnsmasq] port=0 interface=eth4 dhcp-range=192.168.1.66,192.168.1.70,1h # pxe-service=x86PC, "Install Linux", pxelinux pxe-service=X86-64_EFI, "Install Linux bootnet", bootnetx64.efi enable-tftp tftp-root=/srv/tftp-testing/ log-queries log-dhcp [/srv/tftp-testing] mkdir tftp-testing cd tftp-testing wget http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz tar xzvf netboot.tar.gz # not sure why this was necessary ln -s ./debian-installer/amd64/bootnetx64.efi ./ cp -Rp ./debian-installer/amd64/grub ./ cd ../ chown -R nobody tftp-testing
