From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Timothy Sample Subject: Re: Guix on the ASUS C201PA Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2019 09:33:20 -0500 Message-ID: <871s3kjcnj.fsf@ngyro.com> References: <875zswjwoc.fsf@ngyro.com> <87lg1s4bv9.fsf@ponder> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([209.51.188.92]:47283) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1h1Xbq-0006b5-Bc for guix-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 06 Mar 2019 09:33:27 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1h1Xbp-00062q-Gf for guix-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 06 Mar 2019 09:33:26 -0500 Received: from wout2-smtp.messagingengine.com ([64.147.123.25]:36369) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1h1Xbo-00061E-UX for guix-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 06 Mar 2019 09:33:25 -0500 In-Reply-To: <87lg1s4bv9.fsf@ponder> (Vagrant Cascadian's message of "Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:59:22 -0800") List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Vagrant Cascadian Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org Hi Vagrant, Vagrant Cascadian writes: > On 2019-03-06, Timothy Sample wrote: >> I was able to get Guix to boot on an ASUS Chromebook C201PA. This model >> of computer is pretty neat. It=E2=80=99s an ARMv7 (32-bit) machine that= can be >> run with entirely free software. There is even a free graphics driver >> in the works [1]. > > Very excited to try this! > > I've been working on getting Debian to work on it for years, and had it > working with linux 4.8.x... and then haven't gotten it working with any > kernel version since. I've very recently been trying to get Archlinux > and Parabola working on it, but haven't gotten very far yet... Arch Linux ARM worked well enough for me. It even boots from stock Google firmware. It was the system I used to build Guix. I assume that Parabola would be similar. >> For the bootloader, these machines use Depthcharge. Depthcharge boots a >> specially packaged and signed kernel image from a specially marked >> partition. This kernel image is written to the partition directly >> without a file system. > > I have two big technical frustrations with Depthcharge: > > It's really hard to debug or select alternate kernels when boot is > failing. > > The kernel+initrd is limited to ~16MB. linux-libre on armhf is about > 5MB, and the initrd around 11MB... so it's running pretty close to that > limit (Debian initrd's are even larger these days). I even increased the > size of the partition to 32MB to see if it would work, but it refused to > boot from anything larger than 16MB. I didn=E2=80=99t know about the image size limit. Guix (with the very spar= tan PrawnOS kernel build) is only 14M, so I guess I was just lucky here. It might be worth trying to better mimic what Google does with ChromeOS. That is, you could lay out the disk as follows. p1. kernel-a p2. initrd-a p3. kernel-b p4. initrd-b p5. root If you could get initrd to run correctly from a separate partition, then you could both make use of Depthcharge=E2=80=99s fall-back feature and avoi= d the size limitation. In Guix, we could toggle which kernel and initrd partition we write to and set the boot priorities appropriately. This would allow one to fearlessly run =E2=80=9Cguix system reconfigure=E2=80=9D. > [...] > > Thanks for working on it, and I'll try it out and report back. Good luck! -- Tim