NixOS on ARM/Orange Pi PC

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Orange Pi PC
Manufacturer	Xunlong / Orange Pi
Architecture	ARMv7
Bootloader	Upstream u-boot
Maintainer

Status

This article or section is out of date.

Reason: Section refers to old user-provided images. Should be reviewed with cross-compilation, or native compilation through userspace emulation. (Discuss in Talk:NixOS on ARM/Orange Pi PC)
Once the page has been updated this notice can be removed.

@dezgeg's porting efforts to ARMv7 works on the Orange Pi PC, using the proper upstream u-boot.

U-boot support has been merged 2017-12-11.

Board-specific installation notes

First follow the generic installation steps to get the installer image on an SD card.

U-Boot needs to be copied to specific sectors on the microSD card with dd. Download u-boot for the board (uboot-orangepi_pc_defconfig-2017.11.nixpkgs.*.u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin), and copy it to the correct location with (again, replace /dev/sdX with the correct path to the SD card device):

sudo dd if=uboot-orangepi_pc_defconfig-2017.11.nixpkgs.*.u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=1024 seek=8

Then, install using the installation and configuration steps.

Serial console

Your configuration.nix will need to add console=ttyS0,115200n8 to the boot.kernelParams configuration to use the serial console.

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
{
  boot.kernelParams = [
    "console=ttyS0,115200n8"
  ];
}

Compatibility notes

• Using the upstream kernel at 4.13, neither HDMI nor Ethernet will work.
  • #29569 has a comment with a compatible linux kernel overlay derivation.
  • Support for ethernet may land in 4.15.
  • HDMI support isn't in the maintainer's requirements, it may start working in the future.

Resources

• Official product page
• linux-sunxi wiki page