How to install the overlay and usbserial services in SoC Linux?

[MBand4]

Hi,

I am using a DE10 Nano development board which is working great for my embedded application. However, there are a few modules that are not currently installed on any of the SoC Linux images provided by Terasic. I really need the overlay and usbserial modules to be loaded. When you try something like

modprobe usbserial

You get

modprobe: FATAL: Module usbserial not found

The same happens with the overlay module. The usbserial module is particularly important for FTDI devices to work. Even though you properly install the official FTDI drivers, they won't work because the absence of the usbserial module. In the Ubuntu forums, people have installed these missing modules with

sudo apt-get install linux-image-extra-virtual

But the 'linux-image-extra-virtual' package is not available in the Terasic images repositories. Others have solved this issue by re-compiling the kernel which is not a very straightforward process by an inexperienced user.

I don't think you can easily retrieve the current kernel's source. According to 'uname -r' that is 4.5.0-00185-g3bb556b, which again is not in the repositories. Even though I could get a hold of the current kernel source or some other version's source, I still don't know how to include extra modules when compiling a new kernel.

Can anyone here shed some light on how to properly install these modules on this stripped-down version of embedded Linux? Or how can I get/produce a more complete version?

Thanks - Manuel.

[Fawaz_Al-Jubori]

Hello, You need to make sure this module is enable in kernel level. If you select it as (*), no need for installation, since it will be loaded by the kernel. If you select it as (M), then you need to compile the module and add the files manually to /lib/modules in rootfs. Thanks