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Kernel 5.2.21 compiled for Buster and Pyro

November 04, 2019 — BarryK

Alfons reported unable to boot EasyOS from a USB hard drive. The drive partitions were not being recognised in the initrd, and he discovered that the 'ums_cypress' driver module is required to be loaded.

In the initrd there are no modules, and the kernel is supposed to have all drivers required to recognise and use drives builtin, not as modules. I have compiled the 5.2.21 Linux kernel, up from 5.2.10, and have made this change:

Device Drivers -> USB support -> <y> SAT emulation on Cypress USB/ATA Bridge with ATACB

...who would guess that is needed for a USB drive to work? Unintuitive, but anyway, it is done.

The 5.2.21 kernel has been compiled for both Easy Pyro and Easy Buster, and will be in the next release, coming soon.

I am keen to use the new "lockdown" security feature in the 5.4 kernel, will probably wait for 5.4.1. This feature looks like it has an immediate use in Easy's "Copy session to RAM & disable drives" boot option, to reduce likelihood of any sneaky method of accessing the drives. 

Tags: easy