NixOS on ARM/QEMU

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This article or section is outdated. Information on this page needs to be updated. Support for OVMF, kvm and other use cases needs to be checked. Additionally, U-Boot support may have improved. Further information might be found in the corresponding discussion. Please remove this notice once the information has been updated.

Status

NixOS on ARM through QEMU is possible, by using qemu-system-arm on QEMU's 'virt' machine, and the u-boot image for qemu.

Note: [u-boot currently requires highmem=off for PCI to work], so you won't be able to use more than 2GB of RAM.

Board-specific installation notes

Required images

First get some recent sd-image-armv7l-linux.img and uboot-qemu_arm_defconfig-*_u-boot.bin as described the main NixOS on ARM page.

Creating qcow image

Convert the sd card image to qcow, and resize it a bit:

qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 sd-image-armv7l-linux.img sd-image-armv7l-linux.qcow2
qemu-img resize sd-image-armv7l-linux.qcow2 +5G

Booting using qemu

The following command will boot QEMU's 'virt' machine with u-boot and the converted sdcard image, exposing four cpu cores and 2GB of RAM:

qemu-system-arm -machine virt,highmem=off -bios uboot-qemu_arm_defconfig-2018.03_u-boot.bin -drive if=none,file=sd-image-armv7l-linux.qcow2,id=mydisk -device ich9-ahci,id=ahci -device ide-drive,drive=mydisk,bus=ahci.0 -netdev user,id=net0 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0 -nographic -smp 4 -m 2G

U-Boot 2018.03 (Mar 13 2018 - 12:02:19 +0000)

DRAM:  2 GiB
WARNING: Caches not enabled
In:    pl011@9000000
Out:   pl011@9000000
Err:   pl011@9000000
Net:   No ethernet found.
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0 
scanning bus for devices...
Target spinup took 0 ms.
SATA link 1 timeout.
SATA link 2 timeout.
SATA link 3 timeout.
SATA link 4 timeout.
SATA link 5 timeout.
AHCI 0001.0000 32 slots 6 ports 1.5 Gbps 0x3f impl SATA mode
flags: 64bit ncq only 
  Device 0: (0:0) Vendor: ATA Prod.: QEMU HARDDISK Rev: 2.5+
            Type: Hard Disk
            Capacity: 7137.4 MB = 6.9 GB (14617528 x 512)

Device 0: (0:0) Vendor: ATA Prod.: QEMU HARDDISK Rev: 2.5+
            Type: Hard Disk
            Capacity: 7137.4 MB = 6.9 GB (14617528 x 512)
... is now current device
Scanning scsi 0:1...
Found /extlinux/extlinux.conf
Retrieving file: /extlinux/extlinux.conf
847 bytes read in 7 ms (118.2 KiB/s)
------------------------------------------------------------
1:	NixOS - Default
Enter choice: 1:	NixOS - Default
Retrieving file: /extlinux/../nixos/b44d5kfyaixzkzy780br46ls3812cfx3-initrd-initrd
7084057 bytes read in 122 ms (55.4 MiB/s)
Retrieving file: /extlinux/../nixos/ajja3hfl2p4dadbg93rrs0zqrclisrwj-linux-4.16.1-zImage
6550016 bytes read in 112 ms (55.8 MiB/s)
append: systemConfig=/nix/store/km910m22ibjl6rjzfjiivn2mp71d86d6-nixos-system-nixos-18.09.git.1034aa8e9cb init=/nix/store/km910m22ibjl6rjzfjiivn2mp71d86d6-nixos-system-nixos-18.09.git.1034aa8e9cb/init loglevel=7 console=ttyS0,115200n8 console=ttymxc0,115200n8 console=ttyAMA0,115200n8 console=ttyO0,115200n8 console=ttySAC2,115200n8 console=tty0
Kernel image @ 0x40400000 [ 0x000000 - 0x63f200 ]
## Flattened Device Tree blob at 40000000
   Booting using the fdt blob at 0x40000000
   Using Device Tree in place at 40000000, end 40012fff

Starting kernel ...

[    0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0
[    0.000000] Linux version 4.16.1 (nixbld@localhost) (gcc version 7.3.0 (GCC)) #1-NixOS SMP Sun Apr 8 12:29:52 UTC 2018
[    0.000000] CPU: ARMv7 Processor [412fc0f1] revision 1 (ARMv7), cr=10c5387d
[…]

<<< Welcome to NixOS 18.09.git.1034aa8e9cb (armv7l) - ttyAMA0 >>>

The "root" account has an empty password.  


Run `nixos-help` or press <Alt-F8> for the NixOS manual.

nixos login: root (automatic login)


[root@nixos:~]#

Note: first boot might take a bit longer, due to the root file system being resized to the disk size.

QEMU AArch64

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This article or section needs to be expanded. Further information may be found in the related discussion page. Please consult the pedia article metapage for guidelines on contributing.

 $ nix-build -A pkgsCross.aarch64-multiplatform.ubootQemuAarch64
 $ qemu-system-aarch64 -nographic \
    -machine virt -cpu cortex-a57 \
    -bios result/u-boot.bin \
    ./nixos-sd-image-21.03pre262561.581232454fd-aarch64-linux.img \
    -m 4G