Re: cannot boot from microSD card on aarch64 machine

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Wed, 02 Mar 2022 19:52:18 +0100
Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> wrote:

> Do I need to prepare the microSD card at all?  There’s no
> documentation in the manual, so I have no idea what to do with it
> prior to “guix system init”.  Looking at the code I assumed that the
> disk-image-installer procedures take care of placing whatever blobs
> are needed at the expected locations.

Long time ago I managed to boot Guix on a Lime 1 A20 and it worked. 

I used a command similar to this one (probably the equivalent with guix
image that is now deprecated or removed):
> guix system image --target=arm-linux-gnueabihf -t raw-with-offset \
> system.scm

This takes care of writing the bootloader at the right location on the
image. However I'm not sure what happens if the bootloader gets too big
and get overwritten by the GPT or MBR partition table.

With the command above, you'll have to adjust the target for ARM 64bit.

The issue for me is that at some point the boot broke: I saw u-boot and
the kernel and the init on the serial port, but the init never
completed and I didn't find enough time to correctly investigate the
issue. But at least the bootloader is probably still working fine.

In my TODO list I also wanted to add u-boot for qemu_arm
(qemu_arm_defconfig) and qemu_arm64 (qemu_arm64_defconfig) to be able
to enable people to more easily test ARM support without any special
hardware, but that doesn't advance fast at all due to the lack of time.

Denis.

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