Talk:NixOS on ARM
QEMU support
As of June 2016, the versatile build of u-boot isn't built anymore.
Furthermore, the pre-built image is not present anymore on the mirror.
U-Boot: Drop Versatile build
I had broken this at some point and the patch conflicts quite often. Hopefully soon the Raspberry Pi 2 emulation in QEMU can be used instead.
— https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/18572e23590f7407be60926e6d98d1a3580571c1
Relevant edit: https://nixos.wiki/index.php?title=NixOS_on_ARM&diff=647&oldid=505
--Samueldr (talk) 20:01, 3 September 2017 (UTC)
Hopefully, there will soon (U-Boot 2018.01 release, I hope) an easy way to do this: https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2017-August/304302.html
--Dezgeg (talk) 08:25, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
It's coming back soon, I'll let Dezgeg do the write-up when ready.
Don't want to wait? Here's the IRC log on #nixos with instructions.
--— samueldr (talk) 01:14, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
This has changed by now - u-boot supports QEMU's 'virt' machine (with highmem=off, though). Added to the wiki at NixOS_on_ARM/QEMU .
--— flokli (talk) 23:23, 10 April 2018 (UTC)
Native support for raspi in nixpkgs
Since a couple of months hydra also builds nixpkgs for arm64. Additionally some configuration is already in nixpkgs for raspi2 and raspi1, however no binary cache is available.
Raspi3 should be natively supported but right now there is no guide on how to build an image and install it. There is https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd/sd-image-aarch64.nix but the image really is nowhere to be found. --Makefu (talk) 08:51, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
Added now. --Dezgeg (talk) 18:07, 16 September 2017 (UTC)
NixOS "support" for board-specific kernels or bootloaders
I re-worked the introduction paragraph of the article, but I have added a partly unfounded remark about NixOS being able to work with specific kernels or bootloaders. The remark is built on the fact that there is a raspberry pi specific image using a specific kernel, that it is possible to use upstream forks with fixes for the kernel. There is no documentation yet on how to use a vendor fork (e.g. allwinner non-upstream fork) for the kernel or u-boot, and no documentation on how to boot NixOS when extlinux support isn't present in the u-boot build.
--samueldr (talk) 00:12, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
Latest u-boot builds form Hydra
This isn't perfect, but fresh from nixpkgs-unstable.
--samueldr (talk) 01:29, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
Manual cross-compilation
For building veyron_mickey_defconfig this gave me the required dependencies for u-boot 2018.09.
nix-shell -E 'with import <nixpkgs> {}; stdenv.mkDerivation { name = "arm-shell"; buildInputs = [git gnumake gcc gcc-arm-embedded dtc bison flex python3 swig vboot_reference]; }'
Distributed Builds
I've added a short section about using an aarch64 remote builder to speed up builds for armv6l and armv7l (With the advent of the raspberry pi 4, this is probably a relatively convenient way to run nixos on the raspberry pi 1 / raspberry pi zero(w) without suffering very long build times). It might make sense to merge it with the section on cross-compiling with qemu, which also mentions distributed builds briefly, but I wasn't sure how best to do it.