This builds on top of nixpkgs mainline 00d8347180
with the following two PRs cherry-picked:
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/192670
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/192668
using the following command:
```
nix build -f nixos -L \
-I nixos-config=nixos/modules/installer/sd-card/sd-image-powerpc64le.nix \
config.system.build.sdImage
```
I was able to successfully boot the image, although it boots to a login prompt
rather than a shell, and won't accept the empty password for `root`. I guess
I'll have to figure out why that is.
To boot the image: `zstd`-decompress the it, mount it, and use `kexec`:
```
cd boot/nixos
kexec -l \
*-vmlinux \
--initrd *-initrd \
--dt-no-old-root \
--command-line="$(grep APPEND ../extlinux/extlinux.conf | sed 's_^ *APPEND *__')"
```
The machine I used for testing has only one storage device which is completely
allocated to LVM. It appears that the NixOS ISO loader doesn't look for
partition tables within LVM volumes. To work aroundn this, I had to extract the
`ext4` image within the partition table within the `sd-card` image and put that
in its own LVM volume. This likely won't be an obstacle for users who write the
image to a USB stick or similar.
Support for ZFS, while desirable, is problematic with newer kernel
releases. The stable ZFS release seldom supports the current newest
kernel version, and this makes the new_kernel image basically useless as
it cannot be published, and is not often built with new kernel releases.
This uses a dirty workaround to work around the fact it is impossible to
remove a list item from a modules system list type. Since ZFS support is
conditional to being supported on the current platform, we can fake ZFS
not being supported *for the no-zfs build only*. This overlay is only
added when evaluating the image, nothing else.
This is done for sd-images only here, but should probably also be done
for dvd-images.
The --invariant arg should be a better way of making mkfs.vfat deterministic.
The previous version of invoking faketime was building fine and reproducible
when I was compiling an sdimage for aarch64 under emulation.
It was however still logging errors:
ERROR: ld.so: object '/nix/store/1c2cp2709kmvby8ql2n9946v7l52nn50-libfaketime-0.9.9/lib/libfaketime.so.1' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/nix/store/1c2cp2709kmvby8ql2n9946v7l52nn50-libfaketime-0.9.9/lib/libfaketime.so.1' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
The logged errors were presumably inaccurate somehow as calling
faketime was required for reproducibility, even though the log makes it
looks like it failed.
this mostly means marking options that use markdown already
appropriately and making a few adjustments so they still render
correctly. notable for nftables we have to transform the md links
because the manpage would not render them correctly otherwise.
Different boards using u-boot SPL require to write to different
locations. Sometimes, the 8MiB gap isn't sufficient - rk3399 boards
write to 0x16384 for example, which is at 8MiB, thus overriding the
fat32 partition with the SPL.
This is supeer useful to allow the normal sd-image code to be used by
someone who wants to setup multiple partitions with a sd-image.
Currently I'm manually copying the sd-image file and modifying it
instead.
