Re: Interest check: U-Boot bootloader support

[Andreas Enge]

Hello,

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 07:43:25AM +1100, Jookia wrote:
> I brought up this topic a long time ago and as since have been thinking about
> this, reading the code base and getting accustomed to it. I've had the 
> intention
> of porting GuixSD to use the U-Boot bootloader, which I think can be done
> without much if any changes to the user-facing configuration.

that sounds like a very interesting project! Maybe it will become obsolete
when grub works on ARM (so maybe you should research its status before
investing too much time), but in the meantime, any effort to have GuixSD
also on ARM would be very welcome. It would be nice to eat our own dog food
for the Novena boards in the build farm, for instance.

> I'm willing to do the refactor and programming required, but I'm sensing it's
> not wanted given the investment in keeping GuixSD using GNU tools for the base
> system and the fact GRUB is being ported to ARM (though this is buggy at 
> best.)
> The only thing U-Boot support brings to the table is that it works and can be
> used to boot Linux on an ARM system. The only hindrance compared to GRUB is 
> that
> it doesn't support encrypted partitions, so unencrypted /boot support will 
> need
> to be added.

Personally I think that unencrypted /boot is okay if all the rest is encrypted.
But given my latest experience, that also does not seem to be supported so far.

Andreas