The whole option set was recommended against since mid-2019, and never
worked with the Raspberry Pi 4 family of devices.
We should have deprecated it in early 2020 for removal by 2021. At the
time I did not feel confident in making such a decision, and never
ended-up getting around to it.
The ***only*** supported-by-NixOS boot methods for AArch64 are
standards-based boot methods, namely UEFI or the pragmatically
almost-standard extlinux-compatible for U-Boot.
You can quote me on that.
Also, make `python3Packages.sequoia` throw a message regarding it's
replacement of `python3Packages.sequoia`. The main sequoia-pgp/sequoia
repository doesn't ship Python code since 0.25.0, just a binary.
This change removes the bespoke logic around identifying block devices.
Instead of trying to find the right device by iterating over
`qemu.drives` and guessing the right partition number (e.g.
/dev/vda{1,2}), devices are now identified by persistent names provided
by udev in /dev/disk/by-*.
Before this change, the root device was formatted on demand in the
initrd. However, this makes it impossible to use filesystem identifiers
to identify devices. Now, the formatting step is performed before the VM
is started. Because some tests, however, rely on this behaviour, a
utility function to replace this behaviour in added in
/nixos/tests/common/auto-format-root-device.nix.
Devices that contain neither a partition table nor a filesystem are
identified by their hardware serial number which is injecetd via QEMU
(and is thus persistent and predictable). PCI paths are not a reliably
way to identify devices because their availability and numbering depends
on the QEMU machine type.
This change makes the module more robust against changes in QEMU and the
kernel (non-persistent device naming) and by decoupling abstractions
(i.e. rootDevice, bootPartition, and bootLoaderDevice) enables further
improvement down the line.