Re: Pinebook Pro boot from NVME

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2023-10-07, paul via wrote:
> I'm interested in using the best distro in the world on my Pinebook Pro 
> (currently the bootloader is broken on master, see [0], but guix 
> time-machine allows me to still be able to proceed).

I was not aware of this bug, will try and take a look at it sometime,
though not quire sure when...


> I'm able to do so and Guix boots perfectly from choosing the SD card
> from the Tow Boot menu but I'm unable to make the default image boot
> from a NVME disk.
>
> This is the workflow I'm using:
>
> image=$(guix time-machine --commit=d6a53849935f8584e1df57faa79c18c23fbb2aa1 --system image -e '(@ (gnu system images pinebook-pro) pinebook-pro-barebones-raw-image)' --system=aarch64-linux)

If you are using this specific commit to get a working u-boot, you
probably do not need to, as Tow Boot replaces u-boot entirely... but on
to the real issue...


> sudo dd if=$image of=/dev/mmblk1 bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync
>
> for flashing the sd card and
>
> sudo dd if=$image of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync
>
> for flashing the nvme disk.

Since you dd'ed the exact same image to both partitions, they will have
the identical filesystem labels and uuids, and which one is associated
with the label/uuid may vary from one boot to the next... this is likely
the cause for the behavior you describe...


> I'm using tow boot and i have armbian on emmc, guix system on sd card 
> and guix system on nvme. One really strange behavior happens:
>
>  1. I choose the nvme option in tow boot
>  2. I'm instantaneously presented the U-Boot menu (as opposed to when I
>     choose the sd card, where I'm also presented u-boot but quite a lot
>     slower) so I'm pretty sure that the bootloader is correctly read
>     from the disk
>  3. a Guix System loads but when I log in as root and run mount the /
>     filesystem is mounted on /dev/mmblk1

Does it boot to the NVMe partition correctly when you remove the SD
card?

You need to change at least one of them to use a different filesystem
label, and the system configuration needs to be updated as well. Or
build a second image with an alternate label/uuid (it should go fairly
fast, as most of the components will be identical). It would also be
wise to not have identical uuids, though I am not sure how easy that is
to do...


live well,
  vagrant

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