Xbox 360 Wireless Controller Works but is Endlessly Blinking

[Bruxism]

I haven an official brand Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver and Xbox 360 wireless controller. They work and are detected, but the controller LEDs--the ring--endlessly blink. It's irritating.

The problem appears to me to be due to an old xpad driver that's built into the kernel as it's mentioned in old posts and works fine on Linux Mint with its version.

I spent hours doing research with/out ChatGPT to try and figure out how to disable xpad so that I could set up xboxdrv package or maybe put in a newer version of xpad via modprobe because xboxdrv worked okay with xboxdrv –-detach-kernel-driver, but I couldn't activate the daemon. Also, the controller would read as a second one somehow.

It turns out since xpad is builtin to the kernel, that I can't just disable it with modprobe; I have to pass initcall_blacklist= as a kernel parameter to disable it in this case.

ChatGPT led me to think that I could read/edit /dev/mmcblk0p3 with fw_printenv/fw_setenv commands as I found env settings there with hexdump, but I couldn't figure out the right environment size to get those commands to work. I used hexdump to see where the end of the variables were, and I threw a whole load of guesses. Was it even possible that way?

Anyways, I'm trying to learn how to contribute, but I'm stuck. I welcome explanation and pointers.