NixOS on ARM: Difference between revisions

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== Porting NixOS to new boards ==

The easy way (if you're lucky)

=== The easy way ===

''(if you're lucky)''

If your board is an ARMv7 board supported by multi_v7_defconfig and you have access to U-Boot on the board, getting <code>sd-image-armv7l-linux.img</code> to boot is the easiest option:

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* If you're lucky and your U-Boot build comes with the extlinux.conf support built in, the image boots out-of-the-box. This is the case for all (upstream) Allwinner and Tegra U-Boots, for instance.

* Otherwise, you can get the boot information (path to kernel zImage, initrd, DTB, command line arguments) by extracting <code>extlinux.conf</code> from the boot partition of the image, and then attempt to boot it via the U-Boot shell, or some other mechanism that your board's distro uses (e.g. <code>uEnv.txt</code>).

==== Building u-boot from your NixOS PC ====

Assuming

* Your board is supported upstream by u-boot or there is a recent enough fork with <code>extlinux.conf</code> support.

* You do not have nix setup on an ARM device

* Your nix isn't setup for cross-compilation

It is still possible to build u-boot using tools provided by NixOS.

In the following terminal session, replace <code>orangepi_pc_defconfig</code> with the appropriate board [http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot.git;a=tree;f=configs;hb=HEAD from the configs folder] of u-boot.

{{Commands|<nowiki>

$ nix-shell -E 'with import <nixpkgs> {}; stdenv.mkDerivation { name = "arm-shell"; buildInputs = [git gnumake gcc gcc-arm-embedded dtc]; }'

$ git clone git://git.denx.de/u-boot.git

$ cd u-boot

# We're checking out a version from before the use of `binman`.

# The dtc package is 1.4.2, which does not include `pylibftd`.

# Furthermore, I do not know how to package the library so it would be

# available in the python interpreter, making binman happy.

$ git checkout v2017.03

$ make -j4 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-eabi- orangepi_pc_defconfig

$ make -j4 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-eabi-

</nowiki>}}

The name of the final file will change depending on the board. For this specific build, and most Allwinner builds, the file will be named <code>u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin</code>.

=== The hard way ===