GuixSD on the SoftIron OverDrive 1000 (AArch64)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello Guix!

Following advice and encouragements from Vagrant and Danny :-), I
successfully installed GuixSD on the SoftIron OverDrive 1000 machine
that was donated last January¹ (its PSU died a while back and I just
received a replacement from SoftIron, and I thought it was also a good
time to replace the distro.)

The device comes with openSuSE preinstalled and I had first installed
Guix from the binary tarball.  It’s a “normal” UEFI machine so we can
use ‘grub-efi’ directly.  I came up with this GuixSD config:

  
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/hydra/overdrive.scm

The main difficulty was to come up with the right combination of modules
for the initrd, without which we’d fail to mount the root file system.
Fortunately the OverDrive has a serial output that makes it easy to
debug boot failures.

With that config, I just run:

  guix system init overdrive.scm /

and that’s it!

On the first boot, the GuixSD activation snippets fail while trying to
install /etc, /etc/pam.d, and /etc/skel, and /etc/ssl because these
directories already exist (from openSuSE) whereas GuixSD assumes that
they don’t.  The solution is just to remove/rename them from the Guile
initrd REPL.  Once this is done, booting proceeds flawlessly and
happiness ensues.

Really nice to see that it’s this easy and fully functional with 100%
free software!

Cheers,
Ludo’.

¹ https://gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2018/aarch64-build-machines-donated/