Re: boot the Hurd with Guix

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi rennes!

rennes@openmailbox.org skribis:

> Finally I was able to start the Hurd with the binaries generated with the guix package manager.

Woohoo!  Does that mean you were able to run packages cross-compiled
with Guix, or packages built natively with Guix?

> At the moment the image of Hurd I have built it manually and does not yet have any functionality like GuixSD / Linux.

… or did you build a VM image of GNU/Hurd?

> Next goal:
>   * Generate the image file in the style of guix.
>   ** For this I have noticed that it is required to compile qemu for the architecture i586-pc-gnu, at the moment I could not compile qemu in Hurd. I have tried to disable some quemu features that come by default; however, I have not yet achieved it.

Things like ‘guix system vm’ use QEMU because we need to start a VM
because on GNU/Linux one needs to be root to create a file system, mount
it, and populate it.

However, on GNU/Hurd, file systems can be mounted without being root.
So you could in fact skip QEMU altogether, though that’d require
tweaking in the VM-generation code (in (gnu build vm), etc.).

> Other pending things:
>   * Some packages fail during the compilation and testing phases.
>   * Other packages used by guix, such as lsof are not ported in Hurd yet.

We could probably get rid the lsof dependency.  What matters here is a
Linuxish /proc.

Anyway, congrats on this milestone!  :-)

Ludo’.