[bug#30216] [WIP] system: Add ARM installer; services: agetty: Make tty optional

[Danny Milosavljevic]

Hi Ludo,

On Tue, 23 Jan 2018 12:39:10 +0100
address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:

> What would it mean to have an “ARM” installer?  I’d expect these things
> to be board-specific, no?

I hope it's not that board-specific.  There are minimal differences but
many ARM boards use the same Linux kernel (with the same config).

This was one of the motivation to create u-boot:  u-boot is like a
board-specific mini-Linux kernel.  The Linux kernel that u-boot then
loads later is not board-specific.

In the past, board vendors kept putting huge board configuration tables inside
Linux until Linus put a stop to it.

Nowadays it should not be the case anymore that Linux is board-specific.

Therefore, I think it would be preferrable in the long run if
Hydra didn't build 1000 different 1 GB images for different boards
where the only different part is u-boot.

This is preparatory work which is very much work-in-progress, mostly
as a discussion basis.

There's a thread about it on guix-devel, "Porting GuixSD to ARM article.".

So long story short, about 99% of the image this arm-installer generates
will work and be identical for almost every ARMv7 board, except for u-boot
(u-boot is kinda important, though).