Librem Mini with pureboot/head don't boot GuixSD

Librem Mini with pureboot/head don't boot GuixSD

[Roland Everaert via]

Hello,

I have installed GuixSD on a Librem Mini, from Purism. After rebooting, the system stubbornly stay on the pre-boot screen with the last line printed being ‘Found kexec boot params’.

I have tried re-signing the content of /boot with my librem key, generating new TOTP/HOTP secrets and other thing from the pureboot GUI, but still, no boot to the new OS. does someone managed to run Guix with pureboot/head?

Regards,

Roland Everaert
---
Use the F.O.S.S., Luke

Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com/) Secure Email.

Re: Librem Mini with pureboot/head don't boot GuixSD

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice]

Bonjour Roland,

I've ordered another X230T this summer exactly to experiment with 
Heads+Guix, but it has yet to arrive.

On 2021-08-12 12:59, Roland Everaert via wrote:
> I have tried re-signing the content of /boot with my librem key,

But are both your kernel and initrd in /boot, and is that whence you're 
loading them?  From what I've read so far Heads assumes that they are, 
but this isn't correct on all distributions (such as Guix System[0]).

On Guix, all kernels and initrds are in your root partition's 
/gnu/store, and /boot/grub/grub.cfg points there--not to files in /boot. 
  If the root partition is encrypted, it is GRUB that unlocks it first to 
load Linux.

Could that be the problem?  Could you ask someone from Purism customer 
support about this?  I'd expect a better error message if this were 
simply a case of not finding the kernel in a hard-coded location...

Without hardware to play with, I only know that Heads *could* support 
Guix System (it has all the needed components), but I don't yet know if 
it *does*.  An alternative is to add support for separate /boot to Guix 
System, by copying the needed files at reconfiguration time.  It's ugly 
but enables some exotic use cases that people have considered over the 
years, though not enough to implement it yet ;-)

Kind regards,

T G-R

[0]: The 'GuixSD' name was retired years ago.

Sent from a Web browser.  Excuse or enjoy my brevity.

Re : Librem Mini with pureboot/head don't boot GuixSD

[Roland Everaert via]

Hello Tobias,

I have a good news and a bad news.

The good news, I manage to boot the system.

The bad news, I have to boot the root file system, hence, /. This imply that I have either to re-sign the whole disk at every boot or boot every time in unsafe mode.

To answer your question, I have performed a very basic installation, nothing is encrypted and there is only 3 partitions, /boot, the swap and the root filesystem.

The consequence is that booting is slow because HEAD needs to browse the whole file system to find the kernel. Moreover, because there is always a file changing on the disk, be it in /var/log or /home, for example, HEAD complains at every boot that some files have changed.

IMHO, the HEAD and GuixSD developers need to come together with a solution that allow to boot from /boot, using HEAD, even with a Guix system.

I can apply your suggested workaround, but I will need some help to understand how to adapt /etc/config.scm to copy the kernel to /boot, if it is possible, from the configuration file.

Roland Everaert
---
Use the F.O.S.S., Luke

Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com/) Secure Email.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
Le jeudi 12 août 2021 à 12:59, Roland Everaert <r.everaert@protonmail.com> a écrit :

> Hello,
>
> I have installed GuixSD on a Librem Mini, from Purism. After rebooting, the system stubbornly stay on the pre-boot screen with the last line printed being ‘Found kexec boot params’.
>
> I have tried re-signing the content of /boot with my librem key, generating new TOTP/HOTP secrets and other thing from the pureboot GUI, but still, no boot to the new OS. does someone managed to run Guix with pureboot/head?
>
> Regards,
>
> Roland Everaert
> ---
> Use the F.O.S.S., Luke
>
> Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com/) Secure Email.

Re: Librem Mini with pureboot/head don't boot GuixSD

[Thiago Jung Bauermann]

Hello,

Em sábado, 14 de agosto de 2021, às 08:23:17 -03, Roland Everaert via 
escreveu:
> The good news, I manage to boot the system.

Nice!

> I can apply your suggested workaround, but I will need some help to
> understand how to adapt /etc/config.scm to copy the kernel to /boot, if
> it is possible, from the configuration file.

You could use ‘%copy-kernel-and-initrd’ from here as a basis:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/hydra/
berlin.scm#n97

If you change “/store” to “/boot” in the code perhaps it will work in your 
case.

-- 
Thanks,
Thiago

Re : Re: Librem Mini with pureboot/head don't boot GuixSD

[Roland Everaert]

Hello Thiago,

I manage to successfuly copy the needed files to /boot using the `for each` loop from ‘%copy-kernel-and-initrd’, Thank You.

However, I need to resize (i.e. reduce) the root filesystem so /boot can live in its own one. Currently, copying the kernel files too /boot is useless, as HEAD will scan and sign all the files in /, anyway.

Did you have any article discussing such process?

I find plenty of articles about increasing the root partition, but, none to reduce it.

As the root partition cannot be unmounted online, I need to know if there is a simple way to "switch to an offline mode of sort".
For example, I could map a minimal root FS in memory and chroot to it. An other possibility is to copy a guix system to a USB drive and boot from it.

The USB option seems the easiest, but the one with the RAMFS seems neat.

What are the recommandations of the fine folks on this ML, for such operation?



Roland Everaert
---
Use the F.O.S.S., Luke

Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Le samedi 14 août 2021 à 21:30, Thiago Jung Bauermann <bauermann@kolabnow.com> a écrit :

> Hello,
>
> Em sábado, 14 de agosto de 2021, às 08:23:17 -03, Roland Everaert via
>
> escreveu:
>
> > The good news, I manage to boot the system.
>
> Nice!
>
> > I can apply your suggested workaround, but I will need some help to
> >
> > understand how to adapt /etc/config.scm to copy the kernel to /boot, if
> >
> > it is possible, from the configuration file.
>
> You could use ‘%copy-kernel-and-initrd’ from here as a basis:
>
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/hydra/
>
> berlin.scm#n97
>
> If you change “/store” to “/boot” in the code perhaps it will work in your
>
> case.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Thanks,
>
> Thiago

Re: Librem Mini with pureboot/head don't boot GuixSD

[Thiago Jung Bauermann]

Hello Roland,

Em quinta-feira, 19 de agosto de 2021, às 11:57:45 -03, Roland Everaert 
escreveu:
> I manage to successfuly copy the needed files to /boot using the `for
> each` loop from ‘%copy-kernel-and-initrd’, Thank You.

That’s great!

> However, I need to resize (i.e. reduce) the root filesystem so /boot can
> live in its own one. Currently, copying the kernel files too /boot is
> useless, as HEAD will scan and sign all the files in /, anyway.
> 
> Did you have any article discussing such process?
> 
> I find plenty of articles about increasing the root partition, but, none
> to reduce it.
> 
> As the root partition cannot be unmounted online, I need to know if there
> is a simple way to "switch to an offline mode of sort". For example, I
> could map a minimal root FS in memory and chroot to it. An other
> possibility is to copy a guix system to a USB drive and boot from it.
> 
> The USB option seems the easiest, but the one with the RAMFS seems neat.
> 
> What are the recommandations of the fine folks on this ML, for such
> operation?

I don’t have any resource about how to shrink a partition and its 
filesystem. I would boot into some distro’s live image and do it from 
there.

Shrinking a partition is dangerous and error-prone because there are two 
steps:

1. Shrink the filesystem
2. Shrink the partition

If you get the size calculation wrong in step 2 you’ll end up cutting off 
the end of your filesystem and thus corrupt it.

So I believe the recommended practice is to always shrink the partition to 
be slightly bigger than the filesystem to make sure you don’t take that 
risk. You can then optionally grow back the filesystem to fill the slack 
space (filesystem resizing tools can automatically calculate the correct 
size to fill the partition).

Since this is a risky operation, you have to make sure you have backups of 
everything. And since you need to do that, to be honest what I would 
*really* do is wipe everything out, repartition the disk to the new layout 
and then restore from backups...

-- 
Thanks,
Thiago

Re : Re: Librem Mini with pureboot/head don't boot GuixSD

[Roland Everaert]

Hello again,

I am slowly moving forward with this topic.

I manage to reinstall GuixSD on the librem Mini. But, now I am having issues with configuring GuixSD to add an entry to the bootloader menu, so, I can tell HEADS to actually use the kernel in the separate partition mounted to /boot. I discover that HEADS, actually, read the content of grub.cfg to propose a list of system to boot on.

Without the form (menu-entries), in the bootloader definition, 'reconfigure' runs fine. So what am I doning wrong?

When the form (menu-entries) is not present, the only notable thing is that the system does not mount the partition ("15dd9d6b-801b-4c57-b2dd-8712405d54e1") to /boot, as a part of the reconfigure operation and the fact that the copy of the kernel files should happen after the reconfigure. However, after rebooting the system, the partition is mounted properly, so it is only during the reconfigure that the partition has not been mounted. Is this intentional?

When executing reconfigure with the file pasted below, I got a huge backtrace. Below is the head of the backtrace.

Backtrace:
          16 (primitive-load "/root/.config/guix/current/bin/guix")
In guix/ui.scm:
   2185:7 15 (run-guix . _)
  2148:10 14 (run-guix-command _ . _)
In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
  1752:10 13 (with-exception-handler _ _ #:unwind? _ # _)
In guix/status.scm:
    820:3 12 (_)
    800:4 11 (call-with-status-report _ _)
In guix/scripts/system.scm:
   1228:4 10 (_)
In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
  1752:10  9 (with-exception-handler _ _ #:unwind? _ # _)
In guix/store.scm:
   658:37  8 (thunk)
   1320:8  7 (call-with-build-handler #<procedure 7fab87073450 at g…> …)
  2108:24  6 (run-with-store #<store-connection 256.99 7fab87069910> …)
In guix/scripts/system.scm:
  1252:15  5 (_ _)
    807:9  4 (perform-action reconfigure #<<image> name: #f format:…> …)
In gnu/bootloader/grub.scm:
   496:13  3 (grub-configuration-file #<<bootloader-configuration> …> …)
In srfi/srfi-1.scm:
    241:2  2 (map _ _)
In ice-9/boot-9.scm:
  1685:16  1 (raise-exception _ #:continuable? _)
  1685:16  0 (raise-exception _ #:continuable? _)

ice-9/boot-9.scm:1685:16: In procedure raise-exception:
In procedure map: Wrong type argument: (#<<menu-entry> label: "GNU with Linux-Libre 5.13.12" device: #<<uuid> type: ext4 bv: #vu8(141 147 13 97 214 101 77 110 183 1 83 125 191 171 22 162)> device-mount-point: "/" linux: #<file-append #<package linux-libre@5.13.12 gnu/packages/linux.scm:759 7fab8a058000> "/ bzImage"> linux-arguments: ("--root=8d930d61-d665-4d6e-b701-537dbfab16a2" #<gexp (string-append "--system=" #<gexp-input #<<operating-system> kernel: #<package linux-libre@5.13.12 gnu/packages/linux.scm:759 7fab8a058000> kernel-loadable-modules: () kernel-arguments: ("modprobe.blacklist=usbmouse,usbkbd" "quiet") hurd: #f bootloader: #<<bootloader-configuration> bootloader: #<<bootloader> name: grub package: #<package grub@2.06 gnu/packages/bootloaders.scm:90 7fab8a226780> installer: #<gexp (lambda (bootloader device mount-point) (let ((grub (string-append bootloader "/sbin/grub-install")) (install-dir (string-append mount-point "/boot"))) (


Below is my config.scm content:

(use-modules (gnu) (guix build utils))
(use-service-modules desktop networking ssh xorg)

(for-each (lambda (file)
	    (let ((target (string-append "/boot/" (basename file))))
	      (unless (file-exists? target)
		(format #t "copying '~a' to /boot...~%" file)
		(copy-recursively file target
				  #:log (%make-void-port "w")))))

	  ;; /run/current-system/kernel is a profile.  The trick
	  ;; below allows us to get at its actual directory name,
	  ;; which is what 'grub.cfg' refers to.
	  (list (dirname
		 (canonicalize-path "/run/current-system/kernel/bzImage"))
		(dirname (canonicalize-path "/run/current-system/initrd"))))

(operating-system
 (locale "fr_BE.utf8")
 (timezone "Europe/Brussels")
 (keyboard-layout
  (keyboard-layout "us" "altgr-intl"))
 (host-name "dark-dwarf")
 (users (cons* (user-account
                (name "roland")
                (comment "Roland")
                (group "users")
                (home-directory "/home/roland")
                (supplementary-groups
                 '("wheel" "netdev" "audio" "video")))
               %base-user-accounts))
 (packages (append (map specification->package
                        '("nss-certs" "restic" "gnupg"))
                   %base-packages))
 (services
  (append
   (list (service xfce-desktop-service-type)
         (service openssh-service-type)
         (set-xorg-configuration
          (xorg-configuration
           (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout))))
   %desktop-services))
 (bootloader
  (bootloader-configuration
   (bootloader grub-bootloader)
   (targets '("/dev/sdb"))
   (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout)
   (menu-entries
    (menu-entry
     (label "Guix for Pureboot")
     (device (uuid "15dd9d6b-801b-4c57-b2dd-8712405d54e1"))))))
 (swap-devices
  (list (uuid "22be707b-6a27-4f14-81cb-6a1a9c6d2c12")))
 (file-systems
  (append (list (file-system
		 (mount-point "/")
		 (device
		  (uuid "8d930d61-d665-4d6e-b701-537dbfab16a2"
			'ext4))
		 (type "ext4"))
		(file-system
		 (mount-point "/boot")
		 (dependencies (list "/"))
		 (device
		  (uuid "15dd9d6b-801b-4c57-b2dd-8712405d54e1"
			'ext4))
		 (type "ext4")))
	  %base-file-systems)    ))




Roland Everaert
---
Use the F.O.S.S., Luke

Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Le vendredi 20 août 2021 à 00:39, Thiago Jung Bauermann <bauermann@kolabnow.com> a écrit :

> Hello Roland,
>
> Em quinta-feira, 19 de agosto de 2021, às 11:57:45 -03, Roland Everaert
>
> escreveu:
>
> > I manage to successfuly copy the needed files to /boot using the `for each` loop from ‘%copy-kernel-and-initrd’, Thank You.
>
> That’s great!
>
> > However, I need to resize (i.e. reduce) the root filesystem so /boot can
> >
> > live in its own one. Currently, copying the kernel files too /boot is
> >
> > useless, as HEAD will scan and sign all the files in /, anyway.
> >
> > Did you have any article discussing such process?
> >
> > I find plenty of articles about increasing the root partition, but, none
> >
> > to reduce it.
> >
> > As the root partition cannot be unmounted online, I need to know if there
> >
> > is a simple way to "switch to an offline mode of sort". For example, I
> >
> > could map a minimal root FS in memory and chroot to it. An other
> >
> > possibility is to copy a guix system to a USB drive and boot from it.
> >
> > The USB option seems the easiest, but the one with the RAMFS seems neat.
> >
> > What are the recommandations of the fine folks on this ML, for such
> >
> > operation?
>
> I don’t have any resource about how to shrink a partition and its
>
> filesystem. I would boot into some distro’s live image and do it from
>
> there.
>
> Shrinking a partition is dangerous and error-prone because there are two
>
> steps:
>
> 1.  Shrink the filesystem
> 2.  Shrink the partition
>
>     If you get the size calculation wrong in step 2 you’ll end up cutting off
>
>     the end of your filesystem and thus corrupt it.
>
>     So I believe the recommended practice is to always shrink the partition to
>
>     be slightly bigger than the filesystem to make sure you don’t take that
>
>     risk. You can then optionally grow back the filesystem to fill the slack
>
>     space (filesystem resizing tools can automatically calculate the correct
>
>     size to fill the partition).
>
>     Since this is a risky operation, you have to make sure you have backups of
>
>     everything. And since you need to do that, to be honest what I would
>
>     really do is wipe everything out, repartition the disk to the new layout
>
>     and then restore from backups...
>
>     --
>
>     Thanks,
>
>     Thiago
>

Re: Librem Mini with pureboot/head don't boot GuixSD

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice]

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Bonjour Roland,

Roland Everaert 写道：
> Without the form (menu-entries), in the bootloader definition, 
> 'reconfigure' runs fine. So what am I doning wrong?

You're passing a single ‘menu-entry, but ’menu-entries’ takes a 
list of them--even if you have only one.

Try

  (bootloader
   (bootloader-configuration
    ...
    (menu-entries
     (list (menu-entry
            ...)))))

> However, after rebooting the system, the partition is mounted 
> properly, so
> it is only during the reconfigure that the partition has not 
> been mounted.
> Is this intentional?

Kind of, in that it's working as written.  ‘guix system 
reconfigure’ *will* start new services such as file systems, but 
this step is only performed after a successful reconfiguration -- 
and that includes installing GRUB to /boot first...

I didn't look into the service restart code.  Maybe this could be 
tweaked without turning it into a spaghetti mess, maybe not.

Kind regards,

T G-R

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