Re: Guix System on RockPro64

[Tom Fitzhenry]

On Thu, 5 May 2022, at 2:14 AM, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> You could create a "generic" image that supports UEFI or standard u-boot
> methods, and the user can bring-their-own UEFI implementation
> (e.g. tianocore, recent versions of u-boot with EFI) or install u-boot
> or barebox or whatever manually.

Yes, this is the idea behind Tow-Boot. Tow-Boot is an opinionated build of 
u-boot that implements enough of EFI to be able to boot a generic UEFI image.

The same image would work for any aarch64 device supporting EFI: via Tianocore, 
via Tow-Boot, via ARM BBR, ...

I intend to write this up in more detail with my patches.

> My understanding was tow-boot was mostly, at this point, something to
> avoid installing as part of the distro image. You can basically do the
> same thing with mainline u-boot, if you install u-boot to media other
> than the distro media. Or does tow-boot have fancier features working
> yet (e.g. menu interfaces from the firmware) ?

Yes, the distro is not responsible for installing Tow-Boot on the SPI. If a 
user's device doesn't support EFI, and they want to install Tow-Boot on SPI, 
they would need to do that themselves (by following Tow-Boot's installation 
instructions). PostmarketOS are working on delivering Tow-Boot updates via 
LVFS: https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/issues/4294

The only thing Guix needs to do is provide a generic aarch64 image that 
supports UEFI. I have something WIP for that.