Subject: bug#31887: Modules missing to boot on VMWare

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 23:14:57 +0200

Hello Taylan,

Taylan Ulrich "Bayırlı/Kammer" <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Although we don't want to support non-free software, perhaps it would
> be nice to support booting Guix on VMWare without the user needing to
> do anything extra.
>
> While experimenting, I found out that if we just add the following
> three Linux modules to the standard initrd, Guix can boot on VMWare
> just fine: mptbase, mptscsih, mptspi
>
> mptspi depends on mptscsih, and both depend on mptbase, so if
> dependencies are handled automatically, declaring mptspi should be
> enough.

Currently every module we add to the initrd is actually loaded, so we
have to think twice before adding more.  In this case I’d rather punt.

Danny and I started work a while back to load modules on demand à la
udev, so we could revisit that decision when this is implemented.  Now,
if that only benefits VMWare, it’s low-priority for me.

Ludo’.