Re: Pinebook Pro boot from NVME

[Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>]

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On Thu, Oct 12, 2023 at 11:27:37PM +0200, paul wrote:
> Hi Vagrant,
> 
> On 10/12/23 06:41, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> > 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...
> Could you please elaborate on the correct way to boot a Guix system with tow
> boot? I'm not very experienced but, since I run tow boot, how can I build a
> correct image without u-boot?
> > 

Here's a link¹ to my pinebookpro config. The short version is you need
to change the bootloader to use grub-efi (apparently I went with
grub-efi-removable-bootloader but I don't remember why)

  (bootloader
    (bootloader-configuration
      (bootloader grub-efi-removable-bootloader)
      (targets '("/boot/efi"))
      (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout)))

And you need to add /boot/efi as a vfat file system.

  (file-systems
    (cons* (file-system
             (device (file-system-label "Guix_image"))
             (mount-point "/")
             (type "btrfs")
             (options "compress=zstd,discard,space_cache=v2"))
           (file-system
             (mount-point "/boot/efi")
             (device (file-system-label "GNU-ESP"))
             (type "vfat"))
           %base-file-systems))

Towboot should pick up grub just fine and you can boot with that.

¹ https://git.sr.ht/~efraim/guix-config/tree/master/item/pinebookpro.scm#L56

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Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   רנשלפ םירפא
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