Subject: [bug#34356] [PATCH] gnu: u-boot-novena: Allow booting from raw device offset.

From: Vagrant Cascadian <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2019 17:23:28 -0800

On 2019-02-10, Danny Milosavljevic wrote:
> On Wed, 06 Feb 2019 14:35:54 -0800
> Vagrant Cascadian <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>  (define-public u-boot-novena
> [...]
>> +               ;; Patch configuration to disable loading u-boot.img from FAT partition,
>> +               ;; allowing it to be installed at a device offset.
>
> Hmm, why?
>
> https://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=U-boot-novena specifies that it
> loads u-boot.img from the first partition.  Is it incorrect?

It's not incorrect, per se, but this was a simple way to get the
install-os functionality to work without significant refactoring.

I just recenty booted and refreshed the guixsd installation on the
novena I had, and was reminded that installation of the bootloader
required manual intervention from the user, and could potentially result
in an unbootable system of the SPL/u-boot.img were sufficiently out os
sync.

The more complicated way would be to make novena-installation-os and/or
embedded-installation-os smart enough to drop "u-boot.img" in the
correct place, on the first FAT or EXT* partition of the microSD. That
is certainly currently over my head to attempt that at the moment.

I think we had touched on this in the bugs where I introduced
u-boot-novena in #31404.

live well,
  vagrant