Installation guide

Chapter 7. Updating drivers during installation on Intel and AMD
systems
In most cases, Red Hat Enterprise Linux already includes drivers for the devices that make up your
system. However, if your system contains hardware that has been released very recently, drivers for
this hardware might not yet be included. Sometimes, a driver update that provides support for a new
device might be available from Red Hat or your hardware vendor as a ISO image file or a rpm package.
Both these formats supply all the files that make up the driver update together in a single file.
Often, you do not need the new hardware during the installation process. For example, if you use a
DVD to install to a local hard drive, the installation will succeed even if drivers for your network card
are not available. In situations like this, complete the installation and add support for the piece of
hardware afterward — refer to Section 23.1, “Driver update rpm packages” for details of using a
driver update rpm package to add this support.
In other situations, you might want to add drivers for a device during the installation process to
support a particular configuration. For example, you might want to install drivers for a network device
or a storage adapter card to give the installer access to the storage devices that your system uses.
You can use a driver update image file to add this support during installation in one of three ways:
1. place the image file in a location accessible to the installer:
a. on a local IDE hard drive
b. a USB storage device such as a USB flash drive
c. on a FTP, HTTP, or NFS server on your local network (or take note of a location on
the Internet where someone else has placed the image file)
2. create a driver update disk by unpacking the image file onto:
a. a CD (if your computer has an IDE optical drive)
b. a D VD (if your computer has an IDE optical drive)
c. a floppy disk
d. a USB storage device such as a USB flash drive
3. create an initial ramdisk update from the image file and store it on a PXE server. This is an
advanced procedure that you should consider only if you cannot perform a driver update
with any other method.
If Red Hat, your hardware vendor, or a trusted third party told you that you will require a driver
update during the installation process, choose a method to supply the update from the methods
described in this chapter and test it before beginning the installation. Conversely, do not perform a
driver update during installation unless you are certain that your system requires it. Although
installing an unnecessary driver update will not cause harm, the presence of a driver on a system for
which it was not intended can complicate support.
7.1. Limit at ions of driver updat es during inst allat ion
Unfortunately, some situations persist in which you cannot use a driver update to provide drivers
during installation:
Devices alread y in use
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