Re: PinePhone Pro & Guix

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2022-12-24, phodina wrote:
>> Hi all, I'm trying to write a guix code that will generate images for
>> pinephone pro. Can anyone share the config .scm file if anyone has done it?
>> Thanks.
...
> After these environments are running in Guix we can look into the
> hardware. The biggest drawback I'd say is that's still development
> platform. Sure you can use it daily but the mileage varies from
> Android or iOS (mainly power and peripherals such as
> camera)[6]. Though the work already done is amazing and continues to
> improve!
>
> Besides the code not yet being merged in the upstream kernel there's
> another issue.
>
> Without the issue you won't be able to have bluetooth, WiFI, USB
> peripherals (probably more like fingerprint, nfc).

I did briefly maintain a patched kernel for PineBookPro in guix master
for a while until support was upstreamed. I think the old
wip-pinebook-pro branch before it was merged is still in the guix git
repository, if you want to peek at it. It is a similar platform
(rk3399), so some of the basic support is already in the regular
linux-libre kernel guix provides.

I also recently started a similar wip-mnt-reform branch, which just has
a patched linux-libre 6.0 kernel, for something more recent. It is not
as similar of a platform, but it demonstrates at least one way to apply
custom patches and custom kernel configuration for an aarch64/arm64
system.

Not sure how big the current patchset is against mainline for
PinePhonePro. It is not terribly hard as long as the substitute servers
are keeping up with the linux-libre tarballs... and if you can reduce
the patchset to something somewhat reasonable(ideally patches moving
upstream), you can probably merge it into guix master, and get
substitutes too. :)


I'll admit part of the appeal of Guix for me was that it was easier than
Debian to maintain patched kernels for arm hardware support for a
variety of reasons... although of course, some things turned out to be
harder.


live well,
  vagrant

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