Another Raspberry Pi data point

[Richard Huxton <richard@huxton.org.uk>]

I saw Jonathan Marsden's post the other day, but wasn't subscribed then, 
so this will have to be another data point.

I also have a Raspberry Pi 4, and it's quite a capable little machine. I 
run Debian bullseye (still in testing) for the host O.S. and lxd to 
provide container services.

Guix seems to work well for applications on top of both debian and 
alpine containers as the "foreign" O.S. There are fewer pre-built 
substitutes for 64-bit arm than x86 of course, but that is to be 
expected. Likewise, build-time can be a bit long on a Raspberry Pi.

I had some success in using `guix system container` to test some simple 
service setups and see how it worked. Not as slick as lxd (of course) 
but you could see the potential.

I had no success with building a vm or disk image - a build would take 
hours and then fail trying to assemble the boot subsystem, seemingly 
having switched to x86 architecture. This was despite all my debugging 
attempts seeming to show that the guile scripts were aware this was a 
64-bit arm architecture for most of their run.

My eventual aim was to try and create lxc/lxd containers via guix, but 
step 1 of that was to get a VM working. I shall have another attempt in 
a few weeks. Part of my problem may just be that I am unfamiliar with 
arm boot setups.

So - as of the start of 2021, on top of a foreign distro Guix works fine 
on a Raspberry Pi. If you are reading by the end of 2021 I suspect it 
will work in any of the scenarios described in the docs.

-- 
   Richard Huxton