Re: How to run Guix with Hurd

[pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 01:05:28AM +0200, Jan Wielkiewicz wrote:
> Hurd lacks SMP (Simultaneous MultiProcessing), is 32-bit only and it
> doesn't support modern hardware yet.

I too wanted to try Hurd on real hardware.  I see Jan Nieuwenhuizen
does much work on it.

After Jan Nieuwenhuizen’s patches from the beginning of July, I did
partition /dev/sda as dos, not gpt, and created a partition via
mkfs.ext2 on it (with inode size 128, but I think it does not matter).
I can do

e2label /dev/sda1 my-root
sudo guix system init /mnt/etc/config.scm /mnt --skip-checks 
--target=i586-pc-gnu

Then as root in `guix repl`:

((@ (gnu build hurd-boot) make-hurd-device-nodes) "/mnt")

But Hurd does not support SATA disks (I think), so booting gets stuck
when it starts an ext2fs translator.

It can run from QEMU on Linux from an external USB:

guix environment --ad-hoc qemu-minimal
sudo qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm -m 3G -device rtl8139,netdev=net0 -netdev 
user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:10022-:2222 -hda /dev/sda -display 
vnc=192.168.178.86:0

192.168.178.86 is the local IP of the machine running QEMU.  Then one
can connect to the VNC via GNOME Boxes.  Back then it executed the rc
script from gnu/build/hurd-boot.scm and I can put echo shell commands
there and they run, however calls to exec got stuck …  Now in current
Guix there are many new patches and I see the rc script is no longer
in Guix’ code.

I should try again, but this definitely needs users to spend time with
making the system work.  The Childhurd service is probably better for
just watching in awe.

Regards,
Florian