[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Guix System for embedded systems roadmap.
From: |
Ludovic Courtès |
Subject: |
Re: Guix System for embedded systems roadmap. |
Date: |
Tue, 17 Mar 2020 10:44:25 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/26.3 (gnu/linux) |
Hello Mathieu,
Mathieu Othacehe <address@hidden> 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’.