Subject: Re: bug#55806: gnu/system/install.scm includes (service uvesafb-service-type) in %installation-services on all architectures

From: Josselin Poiret <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2022 15:28:31 +0200

Hi,
Pavel Shlyak <[email-masked]> writes:

> Reproducer:
> guix system image -t iso9660 gnu/system/install.scm
> This command fails on aarch64 host. It doesn’t if I manually remove uvesafb-service-type from the list. It is impossible(and not needed) to run uvesafb on non-x86 machines at the moment, so I think it should be included only in x86_64 (and probably 32bit x86 as well) builds.

I can definitely write a patch for that, it won't be worse that what we
have right now.  I wonder how we could handle the case when there's no
KMS for a particular hardware combination (if that's possible), since
kmscon requires that.  FTR, we require kmscon to be able to display
non-latin fonts such as CJK or arabic in the installer.

Now that I think about it, if we have a hard requirement on KMS, we
could just use a lightweight wayland compositor like cage to display the
installer, which would likely simplify the process since we'd have more
"usual" tools at our disposal.

Best,
-- 
Josselin Poiret