Re: Porting GuixSD to ARM article.

[Mathieu Othacehe]

> We could ship the generic ARM image, let the user use
> qemu-system-arm to boot it and set up the correct u-boot in
> there, and only then write it to SD card.
>
> There could even be a small part in the wip-installer-2
> that asks you which u-boot you want and set that up.
>
> I'm just trying to prevent Hydra from building ~1000 huge disk images
> with minimal differences in the future... :)

I agree a single ARMv7 would be better too :) On that point, NixOS seem
to provide a generic image an gives the instructions to write the
bootloader afterwards for every target:

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM

and here,

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM/BeagleBone_Black

I'm not found of this approach as it requires more manual steps but we
could maybe try the same thing.

What do other people think ?

> Yeah, I saw that now.  I wonder how to generalize that.  Maybe try to
> include a union of all possible boot-required modules?

That would be tricky to create and maintain.

Arch Linux does the same thing as NixOS and requires some specific
manipulations for every supported platform:

https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms

Maybe we should look for a distribution that has a generic image with
automatic initrd module list detection ?

Thanks,

Mathieu