Guix

Porting GuixSD to ARMv7

Mathieu Othacehe — December 22, 2017

GuixSD porting to ARMv7 is a difficult topic. There are plenty of different machines, with specific hardware configurations and vendor-tuned bootloaders, and ACPI support is still experimental. For those reasons it is currently impossible to provide a GuixSD image that runs on most ARMv7 machines like on x86_64 targets.

The GuixSD port on ARMv7 has to be done machine by machine and the first supported one is the BeagleBone Black. It was choosen mainly because it runs with mainline U-Boot and Linux-libre kernel.

As Guix already supported armv7, only three things were missing:

1. A rework of the GuixSD bootloader layer to support not just GRUB but also U-Boot and Extlinux. This has been integrated in the 0.14 release.
2. Some developments and fixes on Guix scripts to support image generation, system reconfiguration and installation on ARMv7 in the same way as it is already possible on i686 and x86_64 machines.
3. The definition on an installation image for the BeagleBone Black.

Points 2 and 3 were addressed recently so we are now ready to show you how to run GuixSD on your BeagleBone Black board!

Installing GuixSD on a BeagleBone Black

Let's try to install GuixSD on the 4GB eMMC (built-in flash memory) of a BeagleBone Black.

Future Guix releases will provide pre-built installer images for the BeagleBone Black. For now, as support just landed on "master", we need to build this image by ourselves.

This can be done this way:

guix system disk-image --system=armhf-linux -e "(@ (gnu system install) beaglebone-black-installation-os)"

Note that it is not yet possible to cross-compile a disk image. So you will have to either run this command on an armhf-linux system where you have previously installed Guix manually, or offload the build to such a system.

You will eventually get something like:

installing bootloader...
[ 7710.782381] reboot: Restarting system
/gnu/store/v33ccp7232gj5wdahdgpjcw4nvh14d7s-disk-image

Congrats! Let's flash this image onto a microSD card with the command:

dd if=/gnu/store/v33ccp7232gj5wdahdgpjcw4nvh14d7s-disk-image of=/dev/mmcblkX bs=4M

where mmcblkX is the name of your microSD card on your GNU/Linux machine.

You can now insert the microSD card into you BeagleBone Black, plug in a UART cable and power-on your device while pressing the "S2" button to force the boot from microSD instead of eMMC.

Let's follow the Guix documentation here to install GuixSD on eMMC.

First of all, let's plug in an ethernet cable and set up SSH access in order to be able to get rid of the UART cable.

ifconfig eth0 up
dhclient eth0
herd start ssh-daemon

Let's partition the eMMC (/dev/mmcblk1) as a 4GB ext4 partition, mount it, and launch the cow-store service, still following the documentation.

cfdisk
mkfs.ext4 -L my-root /dev/mmcblk1p1
mount LABEL=my-root /mnt
herd start cow-store /mnt

We have reached the most important part of this whole process. It is now time to write the configuration file of our new system. The best thing to do here is to start from the template beaglebone-black.scm:

mkdir /mnt/etc
cp /etc/configuration/beaglebone-black.scm /mnt/etc/config.scm
zile /mnt/etc/config.scm

Once you are done preparing the configuration file, the new system must be initialized with this command:

guix system init /mnt/etc/config.scm /mnt

When this is over, you can turn off the board and remove the microSD card. When you'll power it on again, it will boot a bleeding edge GuixSD---isn't that nice?

Preparing a dedicated system configuration

Installing GuixSD on eMMC is great but you can also use Guix to prepare a portable microSD card image for your favorite server configuration. Say you want to run an mpd server on a BeagleBone Black directly from microSD card, with a minimum of configuration steps.

The system configuration could look like this:

(use-modules (gnu) (gnu bootloader extlinux))
(use-service-modules audio networking ssh)
(use-package-modules screen ssh)

(operating-system
  (host-name "my-mpd-server")
  (timezone "Europe/Berlin")
  (locale "en_US.utf8")
  (bootloader (bootloader-configuration
               (bootloader u-boot-beaglebone-black-bootloader)
               (target "/dev/sda")))
  (initrd (lambda (fs . rest)
            (apply base-initrd fs
                   ;; This module is required to mount the sd card.
                   #:extra-modules (list "omap_hsmmc")
                   rest)))
  (file-systems (cons (file-system
                        (device "my-root")
                        (title 'label)
                        (mount-point "/")
                        (type "ext4"))
                      %base-file-systems))
  (users (cons (user-account
                (name "mpd")
                (group "users")
                (home-directory "/home/mpd"))
               %base-user-accounts))
  (services (cons* (dhcp-client-service)
                   (service mpd-service-type)
                   (agetty-service
                    (agetty-configuration
                     (extra-options '("-L"))
                     (baud-rate "115200")
                     (term "vt100")
                     (tty "ttyO0")))
                   %base-services)))

After writing this configuration to a file called mpd.conf, it's possible to forge a disk image from it, with the following command:

guix system disk-image --system=armhf-linux mpd.conf

Like in the previous section, the resulting image should be copied to a microSD card. Then, booting from it on the BeagleBone Black, you should get:

...
Service mpd has been started.
This is the GNU system.  Welcome.
my-mpd-server login:

With only two commands you can build a system image from a configuration file, flash it and run it on a BeagleBone Black!

Next steps

• Porting GuixSD to other ARMv7 machines.

While most of the work for supporting ARMv7 machines is done, there's still work left to create specific installers for other machines. This mostly consists of specifying the right bootloader and initrd options, and testing the whole thing.

One of the next supported systems might be the EOMA68-A20 as we should get a pre-production unit soon. Feel free to add support for your favorite machine!

This topic will be discussed in a future post.

• Allow system cross-compilation.

This will be an interesting feature to allow producing a disk image from a desktop machine on x86_64 for instance. More development work is needed, but we'll keep you informed.

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager for the GNU system. The Guix System Distribution or GuixSD is an advanced distribution of the GNU system that relies on GNU Guix and respects the user's freedom.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. Guix uses low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, except that packages are defined as native Guile modules, using extensions to the Scheme language. GuixSD offers a declarative approach to operating system configuration management, and is highly customizable and hackable.

GuixSD can be used on an i686, x86_64 and armv7 machines. It is also possible to use Guix on top of an already installed GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el and aarch64.