Question about Guix on Novena - mainly U-Boot

[Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>]

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Hi,

I'm still in the process of setting up the Novena as a GNU Mes for ARM build
machine.

Guix system on Novena from sd card finally works.

Now I want to make it boot it from SATA instead.

So I did the following:

(1) Used cp -a to copy over everything from the sd card / to the sata drive
partition 2 (ext4 fs).
(2) Fixed up /etc/config.scm to say to install u-boot into target "/dev/sda".
(3) mounted /dev, /dev/pts, /sys, /proc and then chroot /mnt guix system
reconfigure /etc/config.scm
(4) Used novena-eeprom to enable booting from SATA according to
https://novena-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tasks.html
(5) Power off
(6) Take sd card out
(7) Power on
(8) u-boot prompt on Novena serial line never appears

If I instead try to boot Guix from the SATA drive via the u-boot that's on the
microsd card, that fails too, probably because of the patch
https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2008-December/044716.html

That attempt was like this:

(1) Copy the hard drive's /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf to the microsd's
/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf, overwriting the latter
(2) Reboot into u-boot-from-the-sd-card
(3) Wait for autoboot in u-boot to commence
(4) It fails to read the initrd (or anything else) from SATA, eventually
failovers to sd card boot because there's still an old guix generation for it

So instead I did this:

(1) Stop autoboot
(2) Execute: sata init
(3) Execute: part list sata 0 -bootable devplist
(4) Execute: run sata_boot

Then it indeed boots Guix from sata starting from the u-boot from microsd.

But I cannot keep it like this because if there's a power outage and restore,
the build server won't come back up correctly.

Help?

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