Hello guix. My machine only has USB 2 and rusty old spinners. USB is obviously slow and guix with its store will quickly destroy any consumer grade USB stick I insert there. Rusty spinners are so slow I wouldn't want my worst enemy running their OS on them. So, I plugged PCIe card with NVMe SSD drive. Problem is, this BIOS won't expose them as available for booting.
However, one can boot off USB and then "redirect" OS boot to that PCIe SSD. I've successfully employed just this strategy on FreeBSD, which lets you specify a different partition for late stage booting (at this point those NVMe drives have been detected by FreeBSD early stages). So, I installed Guix on that NVMe and thought I'd be clever and put grub-bootloader on the USB drive simply by specifying (target "/dev/sdWHATEVER") in the `bootloader-configuration`. `guix system init config.scm /mnt` went perfectly fine. Reboot and of course `grub` can't find the drive by UUID. And `grub rescue` shows that only this USB is available, sadly it only then occurred to me that `grub` isn't Linux or Guix so I guess it has no idea how to find those PCIe NVMe drives. Is there a way out of this predicament? I can see two options. (1) can some Linux distro/bootloader do the FreeBSD trick: start on USB but then chain-boot Guix off that SSD? IIUC grub's chain-boot is of no help here, cause it simply won't even see that drive; (2) install and run Guix off USB but somehow ensure that "IO heavy" bits are mounted from that SSD. There's gotta be some (file-systems ...) combined with the way I `guix system init config.scm /mnt` (or rather what else I mount under /mnt where) that would achieve this? In the above I'm going the `manual installation` route i.e. I've been more or less following https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Manual-Installation.html Sadly the GUI based install haven't worked for me even once - I always find myself staring at some Guile exception or other. Manual worked every time, though. Thank you -- Best regards Vlad Kozin
