NixOS on ARM/BeagleBone Black

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BeagleBone Black
Architecture	ARMv7

Status

@dezgeg's porting efforts to ARMv7 should work.

Board-specific installation notes

First follow the generic installation steps to get the installer image.

U-Boot and its SPL (called the MLO) need to be copied to specific sectors on the microSD card with dd. Download U-Boot & MLO for the board (uboot-am335x_boneblack_defconfig-2017.03_u-boot.img, uboot-am335x_boneblack_defconfig-2017.03_MLO), and copy them to the correct location with (again, replace /dev/sdX with the correct path to the SD card device):

sudo dd if=uboot-am335x_boneblack_defconfig-2017.03_MLO        of=/dev/sdX count=1 seek=1 bs=128k
sudo dd if=uboot-am335x_boneblack_defconfig-2017.03_u-boot.img of=/dev/sdX count=2 seek=1 bs=384k

In case there is a valid boot loader on the eMMC of the board and the NixOS U-Boot isn't getting launched, try holding the button labeled 'S2' when resetting the board. Also the boot ROM might have a size limitation on the microSD cards used for booting; the author wasn't able to get a 64 GB SDXC card working but a 8 GB SDHC card worked.

Then, install using the installation and configuration steps.

Serial console

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Notes about the boot process

Only serial console (via the 6-pin FTDI pin header) is supported.