Re: guixsd in lxd container

[Eddy Pronk <epronk@muftor.com>]

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 7:54 AM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>> When a container start it runs /sbin/init.
>
> You mean LXD expects to run /sbin/init, right?

Yes, and the LXD container can be configured to run any other program instead.

> The line that’s printed here comes from (gnu build activation):
>
>   https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/build/activation.scm#n442
>
> As you can see, it takes the value of ‘system’ either from the kernel’s
> ‘--system’ command-line argument (/proc/cmdline), or from the
> ‘GUIX_NEW_SYSTEM’ environment variable.
>
> So you’d have to set ‘GUIX_NEW_SYSTEM’ in your case to fix this.

Added this to my start script:
export GUIX_NEW_SYSTEM=/gnu/store/kq71yhydfgc0nksvmmn66cbvbj5a3mvf-system

Great. That works. This got me 2 steps further.

I had to comment out some snippets from activation.scm:

;; activate-modprobe
;; activate-firmware
;; activate-ptrace-attach

(I actually edited the 1 line snippets that get generated somehow.)

Now the boot script starts shepherd.

>> Service file-system-/tmp has been started.
>> failed to start service 'file-systems'  <<== first problem.
>> failed to start service 'file-system-/dev/pts'
>
> What ‘guix system container’ does to work around this is to try to mount
> only file systems that can really be mounted inside a container, with
> the right options:
>
>   https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/system/linux-container.scm#n37
>   https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/system/file-systems.scm#n325

I'd like to get some logging out of the "failed to start service
'file-systems'".
When /sbin/init starts the usb-install image is already mounted on '/'.

What I see as pstree is:

---shepherd-+-udevd
                       `-{shepherd}

failed to start service 'term-tty1' is the last thing I see.
Can someone post a full log of the shepherd startup?

> BTW, did you consider using ‘guix system container’ directly instead of
> LXC?  It’s not perfect but probably worth a try:

I'll give that a try. Maybe just to learn how it does it.

For Ubuntu users (or others distros with LXD) it would be a nice
managed way of trying out GuixSD if I get this to work.


Cheers,
Eddy