From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: =?utf-8?Q?Ludovic_Court=C3=A8s?= Subject: Re: Guix System for embedded systems roadmap. Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2020 10:44:25 +0100 Message-ID: <87d09bco3q.fsf@gnu.org> References: <8736a9lrm6.fsf@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::10]:51445) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1jE8lv-0001Ow-UH for guix-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 17 Mar 2020 05:44:28 -0400 In-Reply-To: <8736a9lrm6.fsf@gmail.com> (Mathieu Othacehe's message of "Sun, 15 Mar 2020 13:39:13 +0100") 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-mx.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Mathieu Othacehe Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org Hello Mathieu, Mathieu Othacehe skribis: > At Fosdem 2020, I gave a talk about using GNU Guix as an alternative to > Yocto, focusing on cross-compiling a Guix System. Here's a status and > my personal roadmap on this topic. I=E2=80=99m not much of an embedded person, but this looks like a great application and it=E2=80=99s great to see progress being made! > * Somehow related to the previous point, producing a disk-image, > currently means spawning a virtual machine. This can be very slow, and > using --system, we currently emulate the execution of a virtual > machine for a foreign architecture. > > I'd like to propose an alternative mechanism which would be faster and > not involving virtual machines. Maybe producing the disk-image in a > container? Unfortunately, I don=E2=80=99t think that=E2=80=99s possible. The reason w= e resort to VMs is that the Linux kernel doesn=E2=80=99t allow you, for instance, to mo= unt a file system without being root. So doing things like running Parted, mounting a file system, and populating it typically requires root privileges. (In some cases, there are tools like mksquashfs that can do that from user-space, but it=E2=80=99s very ad-hoc.) Thoughts? > * Increase board support catalog, even if it's tricky because many > boards need proprietary blobs to boot (such as Raspberry Pis). The > effort started by Danny on wip-buildroot could be resumed. Speaking of which, I=E2=80=99d love to get my A20 OLinuXino running Guix System. :-) I checked what Buildroot had about that board, but I found the information to be rather scattered and of varying levels of abstraction, which made it hard to see if there was anything different from what we do. Thanks, Ludo=E2=80=99.