Need help understanding chroot environment

[frank56]

I am trying to use chroot to configure a broadcom 4306 wireless card. Some of the things I cannot explain is when I do uname -a I get what I think is the kernel from the system rescue disk which I just downloaded, not the kernel in my running system. Another example when I do ifconfig -a :

wlan0 LInk encap: Ethernet HWaddress 00:11:50:0c:e4
Broadcom Multicast MTU:1500 Metric 1
Rx packets =0 there are some more lines but I am hand typing this.

When I try this without rescue disk on my system. I get the following:

ifconfig -a

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0d:56:1f:7b:67
inet addr:192.168.1.3 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::20d:56ff:fe1f:7b67/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4774 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:5055 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:2760732 (2.6 MiB) TX bytes:1280204 (1.2 MiB)

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

sit0 Link encap:IPv6-in-IPv4
NOARP MTU:1480 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

Why is the system rescue disk able to detect my wireless card mac address and my system cannot?

If I continued in chroot and configured the kernel would I get its version when I typed uname -a ?

[bleedingsamurai]

When you are chrooted and you run

uname -a

that is the kernel of the system you used to build the chroot, in this case your rescue disk.

The easiest way to describe a chroot is a primitive sandbox. You are only isolating the file system, not memory, not processes, nor anything else really.
So all you are doing is changing the root directory of the system, the kernel stays the same as the one you booted.
I would say that the recovery disk can detect the MAC address and your HDD install can not is because of a lack of correct driver on the HDD install. It doesn't look like your HDD install is even seeing your wireless card.
You need to build the b43 driver, which is already in the kernel sources, you just need to make sure it is selected for your build.

Assuming that you did indeed compile the driver either into your kernel or as a module, did you also build the firmware into your kernel? It should be in the net-wireless/b43-firmware package if you want just firmware for the wireless card, personally I prefer to emerge sys-kernel/linux-firmware which includes all the firmware available for Linux. After you emerge it, you need to also include it in your kernel's Driver > General section and recompile (this makes Richard Stallman cry but sometimes it is the only way to get hardware to work correctly.)

And to answer your final question, no. Even if you successfully built a new and working kernel from chroot, running

uname -a

will only show the kernel that you booted from.

[frank56]

Thanks BleedingSamari, that makes a lot more sense.