Subject: guix cannot find a module on boot

From: Julien Lepiller <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2019 10:17:14 +0100

Hi!

I've installed the Guix system on my cubietruck yesterday, but had some 
difficulties. At first, the root partition was not available at boot, so 
I got a repl with a message saying that /dev/mmcblk0p1 was not 
available. I added the following to my guix config file:

(initrd-modules (cons "sunxi_mmc" %base-initrd-modules))

although the guix system command worked, the produced system still 
couldn't boot, but this time the message was that guix was unable to 
find sunxi_mmc.ko. Using the repl I could confirm that this module was 
indeed here, but under the name sunxi-mmc.ko. Using load-linux-module*, 
I was able to confirm that loading it made the filesystem available in 
/dev. In the end this line:

(initrd-modules (cons "sunxi-mmc" %base-initrd-modules))

was the right line to add, and I could properly boot my cubietruck!

The bug here is that guix should either be smarter and load sunxi-mmc.ko 
when it can't find sunxi_mmc.ko, or not allow me to build a system when 
I specify sunxi_mmc since it doesn't exist at boot time.