Re: Who has had success installing a Guix system on arm?

[Timothy Sample]

Hi Vagrant,

Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org> writes:

> On 2020-11-05, Timothy Sample wrote:
>
>> For the Veyron boards, it is starting to work quite well.  The current
>> version of U-Boot can boot these boards, but you can also boot U-Boot
>> from the stock firmware (which is Depthcharge).  This is needed because
>> the Guix initial RAM disk is too big for Depthcharge to boot directly.
>
> Curious; I've never been able to get the U-Boot working on the veyron
> speedy,

AIUI, commit fffdf7290cee85232ee522e27c09c7f1178e6219 makes it work.  It
looks like it was included in 2020.07.  I was able to flash U-Boot onto
an ASUS C201 and now it boots nicely (and can be rolled back with a nice
little menu).  (I was gearing up to debug U-Boot myself, and am very
relieved someone beat me to it!)

> but use an old libreboot to boot guix (but only linux-libre
> versions < 5.5, 5.6+ gets stuck in some loop). The initrd size appears
> to be a non-issue for me.

I have the same problem with the kernel, and am using 5.4 currently.

I tried with Libreboot and with stock Depthcharge and had no luck.  I’m
pretty sure it’s a size issue, because every image I built bigger than
16M could not boot, but plenty of smaller ones could (if I made my own
initial RAM disk, say).  IIRC, upstream Depthcharge bumped the size
limit from 16M to 32M and that version should be included in Libreboot.
However, it didn’t work for me in practice.  Either way, I am much
happier using U-Boot.

>> The point I’m trying to make is that Guix can be made to work on armhf,
>> but it is not at all smooth sailing.  There are usually one or two
>> things that need fixing before it will work.  IME, we are close to
>> having a decent experience, but we’re definitely not there yet.
>
> Yes, I'll definitely agree that it is improving, but maybe not that it
> is close. :)

That’s fair!  My glasses are a bit rosy right now because of my recent
success with U-Boot.


-- Tim