Re: cannot boot from microSD card on aarch64 machine

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2022-03-29, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
>>> I mounted the target disk (an SSD) at /mnt, made sure that the microSD
>>> card was inserted, unmounted, and available at /dev/mmcblk1, and then
>>> ran
>>>
>>>    guix system init config.scm /mnt
>>>
>>> This was successful.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, rebooting failed.  There is seemingly no activity at all
>>> when I power on the board, so something’s not right with how u-boot was
>>> installed on the microSD card.
...
> I manually copied the two u-boot files to the expected offsets on the
> microsd card, and that let me boot Guix System from USB.  But I have so
> far been unsuccessful in my attempts to do this automatically as part of
> “guix system init” (I haven’t tried this much) or to successfully patch
> u-boot to boot from the SSD on the PCIe card (I have tried this a lot).

I don't understand this problem, works for me with both reconfigure and
init... does your operating system config reference the same device that
is present when you're initializing the card? ... sometimes i use a
usb-to-microSD adapter, which shows up as /dev/sdX rather than
/dev/mmcblkX if i'm initializing from another machine.


> I think it should be possible to patch u-boot to initialize the PCIe
> card and boot from the attached disk (with the patched u-boot residing
> on the microsd card).  I tried the relevant subset of the netbsd
> patches, but the CPU keeps resetting after (successfully) enumerating
> the PCI devices.
>
> I hope I can make some more time for this soon and overcome that last
> hurdle — and then write a cookbook entry for all this :)

I was able to get it to work! With your updated patch to disable openssl
(and rebasing against newer u-boot), and the phase modifying the config
and the the rockchip include file to add support for SCSI devices.

The netbsd patches weren't needed with 2022.04-rc5.


live well,
  vagrant

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