Re: Guix System on Pine64's Quartz64?

[Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de>]

2021-12-23 / 11:06 / phodina@protonmail.com:

> Hi Mekeor,

Hello phodina,

> On Wednesday, December 22nd, 2021 at 9:00 PM, Mekeor Melire <mekeor@posteo.de> wrote:
>
>> Hello Guix,
>>
>> the manufacturer Pine64 offers a single-board computer called Quartz64
>>
>> (AARCH64 architecture and up to 8GB memory). Is it possible to run Guix
>>
>> System on it? Does anybody have experience with this?
>>
>> Goodbye
>>
>> Mekeor
>
> Yes, it's possible. I'm running Guix on foreign distro (Manjaro ARM).
> See the console output.

Wow, that's super cool!

> You can get the image for the board here [1].
> Also in the latest blog post [2] the dedicate section to Quartz64:
>
>     Linux 5.15 brings Quartz64 device tree
>     Quartz64 now outputs video via HDMI at 1080p 60hz for now; audio out via SPDIF also works out of the box
>     GPU works using the Panforst open driver
>     Tianocore EDK II implemented and allows for full UEFI

That blog post also mentions that

     „[…] Jared McNeill ported Tianocore EDK II to the Quartz64 Model A,
     which means that there is now full UEFI available. The port still
     requires Rockchip’s firmware blobs, however, as Rockchip has yet to
     release the ARM Trusted Firmware sources for the RK3566 and RK3568.
     At the same time, pgwipeout has begun tinkering with mainline
     u-boot. Albeit there is some manual hackery and binary blobs
     involved, he managed to get mainline u-boot running.“

Does this mean that it's not possible to boot the Quartz64 / RK3566
board with purely free software, as long as Rockchip does not release
the ARM trusted firmware sources? 

> I can tell the board now boots and the Sway session over HDMI works.
> Before a month ago I was only able to get SSH connection.
>
> Please follow the instructions in section on installing Guix [3].

Well, I don't think that the normal installation procedure will work.
Especially, GRUB as bootloader won't work, I think.

Instead, one will need to use u-boot as bootloader. Namely a special
version of u-boot with a patch. The installation instructions for Arch
Linux on Quartz64 suggest to use this u-boot-fork

        <https://gitlab.com/pgwipeout/u-boot-quartz64>

which is continuously built at

      <https://gitlab.com/pgwipeout/quartz64_ci/-/pipelines>.

But [1]




> Not sure how difficult it would be to run full Guix System there atm. Currently I focus more on the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro.
>
> $ uname -a
> Linux quartz64-b 5.16.0-rc6-1-MANJARO-ARM #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Dec 19 22:31:26 UTC 2021 aarch64 GNU/Linux
> $ guix describe
>   guix a0178d3
>     repository URL: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git
>     branch: master
>     commit: a0178d34f582b50e9bdbb0403943129ae5b560ff
>
> ----
> Petr
>
> [1] https://github.com/manjaro-arm/quartz64-bsp-images/releases/tag/20211220
> [2] https://www.pine64.org/2021/12/15/december-update-a-year-in-review/
> [3] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Binary-Installation.html


Footnotes:
[1]