Shortcut to adding drivers

[schmidtbag]

I've been using linux for roughly 7 years now, but I've never bothered to compile a kernel and never tweaked one much beyond boot flags or installing kernel headers. That being said, while I'm an experienced linux user, I'm still a noob when it comes to kernels.

Anyway, I own an UDOO (i.MX6 based platform) and I've noted that all images I tried for it (arch, debian, and ubuntu) have very few drivers - basically just enough to make the UDOO's built in hardware work, plus some other simple things like flash drives and webcams. This is somewhat of a problem, as I intend to use a lot of quirky USB devices down the road (kinect, touchscreens, fingerprint readers, etc).

Since there is no installed package for the kernel image, I was wondering if it was possible to take a currently existing armhf linux-image (maybe from debian or ubuntu since I know they sometimes keep record of some of their older kernels) package and copy its drivers to the booting kernel. If this is possible, would I be able to take drivers from the 3.12 kernel, or am I limited to strictly the 3.0 kernel?


I'm open to learning how to compile the kernel, but I'm not really sure where to begin and I can't imagine ARM is the best place to start due to how picky they seem to be.

[WarheadsSE]

You should have at least 3 of these:
linux-udoo, linux-udoo-headers, uboot-udoo-dual, uboot-udoo-quad

[schmidtbag]

Right but that doesn't quite answer my question, because they still lack many drivers.

It wouldn't surprise me if the headers are necessary in order to manually add more drivers the correct way, but I still don't really understand what it is that I have to do to add a large number of random drivers. I'm used to a world in linux where I install a package that gives me the correct drivers and sets them up for me.

To me personally, I think it'd be cool if there was an AUR package that would compile a large collection of drivers that most ARM platforms don't come with (mainly network, USB, and input devices).

[WarheadsSE]

You can do a simple pull request @ github for an updated config. Note, that you should use the linux-udoo package and make menuconfig as noted in the PKGBUILD itself. We can then integrate that into the ongoing builds.