Re: Anyone built coreboot on a Guix system?

[Fredrik Salomonsson]

Hi,

Adrien 'neox' Bourmault <neox@gnu.org> writes:

> Le lundi 12 août 2024 à 17:33 +0000, Fredrik Salomonsson a écrit :
>> Hi Guix,
>> 
>> I was trying to build coreboot for my wife's Lenovo x220 laptop this
>> weekend but I wasn't successful.  I've built it before for my own x220 a
>> few years ago but that was before I migrated most of my machines to
>> Guix.  It was quite straightforward (not taking configuring coreboot
>> into consideration😅).  Figured I'll do the same with my wife's x220 as
>> the brightness control does not work on her laptop after I installed
>> Guix.  It works perfectly fine on mine and only difference is the bios
>> (yay reproducible nature of Guix!).
>> 
>> Coreboot insists on building its own cross compilation of GCC for i686.
>> And it wants Ada support.  I looked into adding a `gcc-ada-toolchain` for
>> Guix but it looks like in order to build Ada for GCC you need GCC with
>> Ada support…
>> 
>> Has anyone manage to build coreboot on a Guix system?  And if so how did
>> you setup the build environment to be able to do so?
>> 
>> I did get it somewhat building by just jump into a Ubuntu container via
>> distrobox.  But it's a bit flaky with certificates, I need to hunt down
>> environment variables set in my Guix environment and unset them for
>> things to work properly in the Ubuntu environment.
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>
> Hi, I'm lacking time right now to explain everything but I'll do tomorrow. 
> I'm a
> maintainer of GNU Boot and worked on porting GNAT on Guix, and succeeded to do
> so privately because I use Guix as my main distro. It's not ready for me to
> upstream it, but in a few weeks probably.
>

No worries, I found a simple workaround for now.  I realized just after
I sent the email that I already got a built coreboot rom.  Which is the
one my x220 runs on.  So today I simply copied that off the chip from my
machine using flashrom and then flashed that to my wife's machine.
Followed the troubleshooting tips [0] to fix grub.  Cleaned up the
connections in network manager as the device name for the WiFi had
changed.  Now it's back to normal but with working brightness controls!

Not sure if GNU Boot supports x220, if it does I wouldn't mind testing
it on Guix once you are done with the GNAT port.  I got a spare x220
that I use for testing things like this (to avoid bricking mine or my
wife's laptop).

[0] 
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Chrooting-into-an-existing-system.html

-- 
s/Fred[re]+i[ck]+/Fredrik/g