Hello Mathieu, Mathieu Othacehe <m.othac...@gmail.com> skribis:
> At Fosdem 2020, I gave a talk about using GNU Guix as an alternative to > Yocto, focusing on cross-compiling a Guix System. Here's a status and > my personal roadmap on this topic. I’m not much of an embedded person, but this looks like a great application and it’s great to see progress being made! > * Somehow related to the previous point, producing a disk-image, > currently means spawning a virtual machine. This can be very slow, and > using --system, we currently emulate the execution of a virtual > machine for a foreign architecture. > > I'd like to propose an alternative mechanism which would be faster and > not involving virtual machines. Maybe producing the disk-image in a > container? Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s possible. The reason we resort to VMs is that the Linux kernel doesn’t allow you, for instance, to mount a file system without being root. So doing things like running Parted, mounting a file system, and populating it typically requires root privileges. (In some cases, there are tools like mksquashfs that can do that from user-space, but it’s very ad-hoc.) Thoughts? > * Increase board support catalog, even if it's tricky because many > boards need proprietary blobs to boot (such as Raspberry Pis). The > effort started by Danny on wip-buildroot could be resumed. Speaking of which, I’d love to get my A20 OLinuXino running Guix System. :-) I checked what Buildroot had about that board, but I found the information to be rather scattered and of varying levels of abstraction, which made it hard to see if there was anything different from what we do. Thanks, Ludo’.
