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JasonWood
2016-04-14, 23:30
Greetings,
I've been working building a custom Kali ISO based on the ISO of Doom, but have run into a driver issue that I haven't found a way to resolve. I'm building a Kali installation to fit onto an embedded amd64 device. However, the initrd.gz file created by live-build does not include the network drivers for Realtek NICs. This causes the install to fail because it cannot bring up the NIC. So far I've not found how to configure live-build to add this to the file.

I've followed the instructions found at https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux/kali-rolling-iso-of-doom/ pretty closely, but have edited the isolinux.cfg and install.cfg files to allow access over a serial cable. Everything else is as described in the instructions.

I'm guessing that this is a hook that I need to add, but I'm not sure where or what that would be. Can anyone point me in the right direction for adding this firmware to initrd.gz so that the install can get passed the point of loading the network drivers?

Thanks,
Jason

JasonWood
2016-04-15, 21:16
Just to add some additional information that I've run across while trying to figure this out.

First, the only network driver that is getting added to initrd is a single broadcom driver.

# ls lib/modules/4.4.0-kali1-amd64/kernel/drivers/net/ethernet/broadcom/
cnic.ko

I'm not sure if this is because I'm building this ISO on a VM and it's picking up on that or if it is just how kali-rolling is configured.

I'm guessing that the hook script that I need to use to add the driver is ./kali-config/common/hooks/live/kali-hacks.chroot. Not sure what to add to this script to enable the realtek firmware before it runs update-initramfs though.