From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andreas Enge Subject: Re: Porting GuixSD to ARM article. Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2018 22:15:00 +0100 Message-ID: <20180122211500.GA2400@jurong> References: <87shc2c3fh.fsf@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:43246) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1edjQn-0000hO-Uy for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 22 Jan 2018 16:15:07 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1edjQm-0006FI-V5 for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 22 Jan 2018 16:15:05 -0500 Received: from hera.aquilenet.fr ([2a0c:e300::1]:35422) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1edjQm-0006Es-NQ for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 22 Jan 2018 16:15:04 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <87shc2c3fh.fsf@gmail.com> List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Mathieu Othacehe Cc: Guix-devel Hello Mathieu, On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 02:12:02PM +0100, Mathieu Othacehe wrote: > A new article is available on Guix's website. It summarizes recent > progress on ARM porting topic. I am reading it only now (since I wish to install GuixSD on an ARM board of mine, but better late than never...). Very nice work and write-up! But I still have a few questions: - Now that there is a release 0.14, could the images not be made available on the website? - In my case, I own an Olimex Lime 1. I think that this might correspond to a20-olinuxino-micro-installation-os. Whatever it is, it does not have integrated memory, but needs to run directly from the micro SD card. So how do I install it, since I cannot boot from one medium and install easily to another one? Should I attach an SD card reader to install onto a second SD card, then boot from that in a second step? Would it not make sense to provide not installation images, but installed images? These could be used to directly boot the machines, and then instead of doing "guix system init", one should be able to do a "guix system reconfigure". To develop a bit more, the two-step installation (first creating a disk image, then installing onto the hard drive) could be seen as an artefact of installing on bigger machines with their more complicated setting using grub, and where taking out the hard disk and copying an image with dd onto it is not so practical... Why should it not be easier to directly boot the final GuixSD on an ARM machine? Notice that the last section of the blog post does not solve the problem: As I realised by trial and error when trying to use a disk-image for a virtual machine, it really is only an installation-image, since user data is stored in an overlay file system that is lost upon reboot. - Suggestion in that context: Rename "guix system disk-image" to "guix system installation-image". Thank you again for the post, and I am looking forward to more instructions for the other boards! Andreas