My next immediate challenge is to remove the nouveau driver from
initramfs. I can pull it out if I boot into runlevel 3 (as it used to be called) and then
rmmod, but it would be better not to have it at all. Any pointers on how to get rid of
it?
This is what I do to, ironically, include a custom-built nouveau driver
*into* the initramfs image as the one shipped with the Fedora kernel is
not synced with the dev branch of nouveau, so I have to built the driver
and integrate it into initramfs separately. The process below shouldn't
be much different if you wish to remove nouveau completely:
update initramfs
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(as root in bash)
export __ver=2.40.6-0
export __dist=fc13
export __arch=x86_64
cd ~
mkdir temp
cp /boot/initramfs-$__ver.$__dist.$__arch.img temp/
cd temp
mv initramfs-$__ver.$__dist.$__arch.img initramfs-$__ver.$__dist.$__arch.gz
gunzip initramfs-$__ver.$__dist.$__arch.gz
mkdir contents
cd contents/
cpio -id < ../initramfs-$__ver.$__dist.$__arch
# do your modifications here
find ./ | cpio -H newc -o > ../initramfs-$__ver.$__dist.$__arch
cd ..
gzip -9 < initramfs-$__ver.$__dist.$__arch >
initramfs-$__ver.$__dist.$__arch.img
cp /boot/initramfs-$__ver.$__dist.$__arch.img
/boot/initramfs-$__ver.$__dist.$__arch.last.img
mv initramfs-$__ver.$__dist.$__arch.img /boot/
A note of caution - the nouveau driver is in /lib/modules/<kernel>/...
as well as initramfs, so if you want to remove it you need to do it in
both places - /lib/modules/<kernel> as well as initramfs as shown above.
I am using 2.6.40.6 (3.0.6) version of the kernel on fc13 system, but
the above process shouldn't be very different for your distro. Hope this
helps.