Aw: Another Raspberry Pi data point

[Stefan]

Hi!

The change in <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/44543> is waiting to be committed by 
someone. And I will send more changes to progress with the Raspberry support. 

Currently I have a booting setup over NFS with the firmware blob, a customized 
U-Boot, Grub and kernel. There is no possibility yet to create an image, but I 
have changes ongoing with a different Grub package to make that possible.

I’m progessing slowly, I don’t have much spare time. And it seems that my 
personal interrests regarding Guix have only small intersections with other 
people’s interrests (who have commit rights), so it takes time for my patches 
to be applied. But I’m patient. :-)

My first contributions were to make NFS booting possible in general. This 
required changes in Guix and Grub. Then I focused on chainloading firmware and 
bootloaders. Now I’m about to provide Raspberry specific U-Boot packages 
(actually ready, but I’d first like to improve the defconfig handling, which 
may later also ease kernel modifications, see 
<https://issues.guix.gnu.org/45046>, which is also waiting to be committed). In 
the meantime I think I found a way to create an image with a chainloading Grub.

However, I currently hit a blocking issue with qemu, which is not buinding 
anymore on aarch64 – it is failing in the virtio-net-test. It is needed to 
build the Grub package. I found no reason why this started to fail, at least 
the same qemu sources were building with an older Guix version.

Any solution to get qemu building on aarch64 again wound be very welcome. :-)

When all this is done, a future step will be to find out if or how the 
linux-libre kernel is usable for the Raspberry and if the rpi-open-firmware 
(already packaged by Danny) can replace the firmware blob.


Bye

Stefan