Re: Guix on the ASUS C201PA

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2019-03-06, Timothy Sample wrote:
> Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org> writes:
>> On 2019-03-06, Timothy Sample wrote:
>>> I was able to get Guix to boot on an ASUS Chromebook C201PA.

So, I've gotten the kernel to load, but the version of coreboot and/or
depthcharge I have installed seems to ignore the presence of the initrd
(which you had mentioned in your initial mail). I guess I should try
libreboot again, maybe it fixed some other things too...


I did manage to get the rockchip.usb_uart with a hacked up USB cable to
produce a serial console for debugging and actually seeing the kernel
logs rather than them scrolling pass the screen only to give a kernel
panic.

  (kernel-arguments '("console=ttyS2,115200" "rockchip.usb_uart"))


Anyone had any luck booting GuixSD without an initrd? I sort of thought
about dumping the initramfs to a partition and trying to work around it
that way...

I've also got patches to pull in u-boot 2019.04-rc3 with a
chromebook_speedy target for installing directly to flash, as well as
one to load from depthcharge. Unfortunately, I still get no
video. Someone's working on porting rockchip.usb_uart to u-boot to make
it easier to see what's going on. Mostly hoping to just get u-boot
support working and forget about depthcharge.


>> I have two big technical frustrations with Depthcharge:
>>
>> It's really hard to debug or select alternate kernels when boot is
>> failing.
>>
>> The kernel+initrd is limited to ~16MB. linux-libre on armhf is about
>> 5MB, and the initrd around 11MB... so it's running pretty close to that
>> limit (Debian initrd's are even larger these days). I even increased the
>> size of the partition to 32MB to see if it would work, but it refused to
>> boot from anything larger than 16MB.
>
> I didn’t know about the image size limit.  Guix (with the very spartan
> PrawnOS kernel build) is only 14M, so I guess I was just lucky here.

This may have just been the older libreboot build I once had; I notice
that prawn-os and gentoo seem to work fine with 32MB/64MB kernel boot
partitions. Or maybe some other misunderstanding on my part about why
depthcharge refused to boot it... just now starting to grasp all those
"cgpt" partitioning flags.


live well,
  vagrant

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