Re: Problems making a bootable aarch64-linux system image

["Ian Eure" <ian@retrospec.tv>]

Hi Christopher,

On Thu, Jan 2, 2025, at 9:03 AM, Christopher Baines wrote:
> Ian Eure <ian@retrospec.tv> writes:
>
>> I’ve tried multiple paths to get this working, including building both
>> installer and system images on arm64 and amd64 hardware.  My current
>> approach is to make a bootable qcow2 system image using Guix as a
>> foreign package manager on top of Debian running in a VM on the ARM
>> hardware.  This is my image definition:
>> https://paste.debian.net/1342063/
>>
>> It’s buildable with:
>>
>>  guix time-machine   --commit=96cd163c14e68c66c6a4cf0b18261fc454f8c1ba
>>  -- system   image vakum.scm
>>
>> (Commits beyond 96cd163c14e68c66c6a4cf0b18261fc454f8c1ba fail, because
>> guix tests are currently broken on aarch64-linux; see #75205)
>>
>> This produces an image which boots to GRUB, but fails to boot the
>> system.  It seems that the framebuffer console is initialized, since I
>> see the QEMU window resize, but then I get a blinking cursor in the
>> upper-left and nothing else.
>>
>> Does anyone have pointers/advice/working configs for this I can hack
>> on?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Do you get any output if you remove quiet from the kernel arguments? You
> can do this from grub or alter your system configuration
> kernel-arguments.
>

No, it behaves exactly the same.  Blinking cursor, no output, no progress.

But thank you for mentioning this!  I've been wondering why my machine was more verbose than a fresh install, and it's because I was clobbering %default-kernel-arguments, so this was indirectly helpful.

Thanks,
  -- Ian