Uboot shim for ls1028a (and nixos)?

MNT Reform
1

Hello! My high level goal is to run nixos on a ls1028a module from the internal sata ssd.

It sounds like some folks have got nixos running with the ls1028a, but I haven’t quite managed booting cleanly into it yet. The normal nixos instructions seem to work for partitioning and installing on the sata ssd. The sticking point (for me) is booting into it.

It seems from a high level like it would be possible to make a sdcard image which is just u-boot and which then loads the ssd instead of the sdcard. (I’m not certain this would work, though)

So my questions for this are:

  1. is there an easier way to boot (or at the very least, quickly go from “starting up computer” to “running nixos”) into nixos?
  2. is the uboot shim a viable idea – and even if so, is it reasonable for an outsider to decode all of whats going on with the rcw build system and configuration?
  3. is there some alternative non-bootloader way of hopping into the ssd, like with chroot + kexec, (possibly from the sdcard debian) which would work just as well?

thanks!~

2

Hi, I don’t know why you call it a “shim”? Here are two patches that should allow u-boot on SD-Card to load boot.scr or extlinux.conf from SATA:

3

What are you stuck at?

I don’t have a Reform yet. My experience is with booting NixOS with u-boot on a Librem 5.

In short: use u-boot as provided by MNT and install NixOS as you did with:

boot.loader.grub.enable =  false;

in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix