Re: ARMHF flash image - Put on website under GuixSD

[Danny Milosavljevic]

Hi Ludo,

On Mon, 10 Sep 2018 14:28:52 +0200
address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:

> > Can we put it on the website at https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/download/
> > inside the GuixSD part?
> >
> > I think it would be nice to have something ready-to-go for ARM systems as 
> > well,
> > and this would be a good start.  Apart from the bootloader, everything 
> > should
> > work as-is in there.  And the user can either keep the original bootloader
> > on the board or flash a new one after booting GuixSD - either in qemu or
> > on a real machine.  
> 
> I agree that it would be nice, but to what extent is this image generic
> to all ARM boards?  My understanding is that images are necessarily
> bound to a specific board.

Yes, but only because of the bootloader (that's a pretty big "but").

It's possible to change it inside qemu, and in the end there has to be *some*
way for a user to bootstrap the things (usually using the vendor image).

ARM boards are very diverse - some load the bootloader and the root fs from SD 
card,
some load the bootloader from flash and the root fs from SD card,
some load everything from flash,
some load the bootloader from flash and the root fs from NFS etc.

In the end we can also provide one image per board, but we should use a
block-deduplicating filesystem then - because everything but ~30 kB of each 
image
will be the same!

>Other considerations include the fact that it’s yet another image to
>build when we make a release, but perhaps the solution is simply to
>improve our automation and build farm availability.

I think if we want to support it it has to be built at least once.
Otherwise we don't know whether it has a chance to work, no?  Having
the flash-image isn't really much more work on top of that.

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