Subject: [alpine-user] Howto: third party kernel modules? And: kernel update, when?

From: Steffen Nurpmeso <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2018 00:12:06 +0100

Hello!

Steffen Nurpmeso wrote in <[email-masked]>:
  ...
 |P.S.: AlpineLinux works just perfect also on (pretty old though)
 |Acer Aspire and MacBook Air!  :--))

Well, i was a bit too optimistic: perfect, but with downsides.

Both laptops have WLAN which goes at a very slow rate, about
128 KB/s.  For both, the Intel in the Aspire and the Broadcom in
the Apple these are known issues (especially the former
i personally find frustrating given that Big Blue pushed billions
of dollar in Linux development, but what do i know).
It seems the Broadcom can be pushed by broadcom-wl (ArchLinux
package name like so).

Whatever, the question is, from someone who never drove Linux on
bare metal since about 2002, does AlpineLinux offer a generic way
to hook in third party modules?
(I have downloaded hybrid-v35_64-nodebug-pcoem-6_30_223_271.tar.gz
and would try to use the wlc_hybrid.o_shipped therein directly,
but i fail integrating it?  How can this be done without source
and compiling a kernel?  If that, i would go the broadcom-wl way,
that is source only it seems; the other contains the source, too.
Licensing issues, i presume...)

Also, i do have an external Seagate USB (0bc2:2332), which cannot
do the BLKFLSBUF ioctl(2) (and the code of conduct disallows the
language necessary to describe the journey to get to that point in
a world of support forums!).  This means that mkfs.ext4 as well as
.btrfs fail, because the final sync fails.  hdparm does not help,
smartctl cannot do this thing at all (info totally messed compared
to hdparm output).  It seems a USB quirk should help (no uas, :u),
yet i have had no success yet.  Long story short: the kernel
v4.15+ seems to have builtin support for the quirk for those
Seagate things (the disc is pretty old, actually).  When does edge
get a kernel upgrade?

The acl package has a broken symbolic link, by the way:

 libacl.la -> /usr/lib/libacl.la

Thank you very much, and thankful for any hint,
a good night from Germany,

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

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