Hey quick update. Typing this from my fully-upgraded MNT Reform!
Thank You for those links; they were crucial to my successful migration. Biggest hurdle (hinted at in the IRC logs) was the stateful reform-flash-* scripts on the system image provided; The Checksum mismatch is apparently due to an updated reform-check et al that is not on that image, along with a few other changes. Running a full apt update && apt upgrade on the system image, not on the prior installation, was required for me to be able to use the reform-tools.
Unfortunately, having taken a page from violet’s experience and decided to flash the system image directly to my emmc when it was not working, I ran into another barrier: There is not enough free space on the emmc at that point to allow the apt upgrade to take place. I had to work around this by mounting my nvme /home partition on /var/cache/apt/ to give it enough space to download everything.
In summation, the steps I took were:
- Run
apt update and apt upgrade on my prior OS.
- Run
apt install linux-image-arm64 explicitly, as for some reason it wasn’t installed. reform-tools was, though.
- Run the commands in the script to remove the unneeded parts from the prior installation.
- Run
reform-check a bunch, addressing the issues mentioned. Specifically, I needed to install a bunch of packages and fix my fstab a bit (though this was overwritten later).
- Configure my MNT Reform to boot to the emmc using
reform-boot-config.
- Reboot.
- Mount one of my nvme partitions on
/var/cache/apt to give apt more space.
- Connect to my internet.
- Run
apt update && apt upgrade in the emmc enviroment.
- Make sure my
/etc/fstab in the emmc environment has a /boot/ entry.
- Run the commands You mentioned in the IRC log:
{ echo LINUX_KERNEL_CMDLINE=\"console=ttymxc0,115200 console=tty1\"; echo LINUX_KERNEL_CMDLINE_DEFAULTS=\"ro no_console_suspend cma=512M pci=nomsi\"; } > /etc/default/flash-kernelprintf "pwm_imx27\nnwl-dsi\nti-sn65dsi86\nimx-dcss\npanel-edp\nmux-mmio\nmxsfb\nusbhid\nimx8mq-interconnect\n" > /etc/initramfs-tools/modulesecho "MNT Reform 2" > /etc/flash-kernel/machine
- Run
reform-check a bunch, addressing the issues mentioned. Specific issues here included needing to update uboot on everything (reform-flash-uboot; reform-flash-uboot emmc; reform-flash-uboot sd) and having to clean up some errant files.
- Perform a fresh
reform-migrate to the first partition on my NVME drive, allowing old files to be overwritten with new ones.
- Run
reform-boot-config nvme to boot back to the right place.
- Reboot.
- Remove the SD Card I ended up not really using, as after updating my emmc uboot it will always be the boot target from emmc, as You mentioned.
- Reboot again.
- Finally in my nvme OS again, but a few stateful things aren’t working on the debian side, and
/etc/fstab has been completely overwritten.
- Run
apt --fix-broken install to fix the conflicts introduced by copying one debian over another.
- Run
systemctl list-units --failed, mine had 3 issues:
- I needed to run
apt reinstall openssh-server avahi-daemon exim4 rtkit to let Debian do its thing.
- I needed to delete the old
/var/log/exim4/* files, as they were not accessible by the new exim4 user.
- I needed to ignore the failed rtkit service, as it no longer exists and disappeared after a reboot.
- I had to reset my hostname using
hostnamectl.
- I had to recreate my user, because (obviously) they were not in the new system yet, despite their homer directory existing (do this before You mount
/home so that You don’t need to move Your files!).
- I had to add my user to the
dialout group, as that’s the only supplemental group that’s missing from the defaults.
/etc/fstab needed to be fully recreated; This prevented Guix from working at all up until this point, as the store is on a seperate partition. Once /etc/fstab had everything, I ran systemctl daemon-reload and mount -a.- I then noticed my time was way off, so I ran
timedatectl set-timezone to set my local time zone.
- I also needed to re-setup a bunch of other Guix things; After downloading the binary install script again, I reran a few of its sections:
NOTE: If You run Guix, this edit bypasses a bunch of the safety checks and stuff. Might be worth rerunning the script as a whole first and seeing if it works for You.
_msg()
{ # Default message to stdout.
printf "[%s]: %s\n" "$(date +%s.%3N)" "$1"
}
_debug()
{
if [ "${DEBUG}" = '1' ]; then
printf "[%s]: %s\n" "$(date +%s.%3N)" "$1"
fi
}
sys_create_build_user()
{ # Create the group and user accounts for build users.
_debug "--- [ ${FUNCNAME[0]} ] ---"
if getent group guixbuild > /dev/null; then
_msg "${INF}group guixbuild exists"
else
groupadd --system guixbuild
_msg "${PAS}group <guixbuild> created"
fi
if getent group kvm > /dev/null; then
_msg "${INF}group kvm exists and build users will be added to it"
local KVMGROUP=,kvm
fi
for i in $(seq -w 1 10); do
if id "guixbuilder${i}" &>/dev/null; then
_msg "${INF}user is already in the system, reset"
usermod -g guixbuild -G guixbuild${KVMGROUP} \
-d /var/empty -s "$(which nologin)" \
-c "Guix build user $i" \
"guixbuilder${i}";
else
useradd -g guixbuild -G guixbuild${KVMGROUP} \
-d /var/empty -s "$(which nologin)" \
-c "Guix build user $i" --system \
"guixbuilder${i}";
_msg "${PAS}user added <guixbuilder${i}>"
fi
done
}
sys_create_shell_completion()
{ # Symlink supported shell completions system-wide
var_guix=/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/current-guix
bash_completion=/etc/bash_completion.d
zsh_completion=/usr/share/zsh/site-functions
fish_completion=/usr/share/fish/vendor_completions.d
{ # Just in case
for dir_shell in $bash_completion $zsh_completion $fish_completion; do
[ -d "$dir_shell" ] || mkdir -p $dir_shell
done;
ln -sf ${var_guix}/etc/bash_completion.d/* "$bash_completion";
ln -sf ${var_guix}/share/zsh/site-functions/* "$zsh_completion";
ln -sf ${var_guix}/share/fish/vendor_completions.d/* "$fish_completion"; } &&
_msg "${PAS}installed shell completion"
}
sys_maybe_setup_selinux()
{
if [ -f /sys/fs/selinux/policy ]
then
prompt_yes_no "Install SELinux policy required to run guix-daemon?" \
|| return
local var_guix=/var/guix/profiles/per-user/root/current-guix
semodule -i "${var_guix}/share/selinux/guix-daemon.cil"
restorecon -R /gnu /var/guix
fi
}
sys_create_build_usr
sys_create_shell_completion
sys_maybe_setup_selinux
After all of that, I have a fully working MNT Reform on System Version 3 that boots from emmc to an NVME drive, without having to start completely from scratch.
Upon reflection, would probably have been easier to just fully start over with a fresh root partition, but I’m very stubborn, haha. I wanted to share my full experience in case it’s useful to anyone else trying to do the same thing.
I think my main barrier was that I have limited experience with Uboot, the ARM architecture in general, and the reform community in general (for news about updates and features; My machine had gotten very out of date). Here’s a brief list of things I learned about along the way that I couldn’t find clear documentation for before taking these last few days; Might try to write a guide to it somewhere eventually:
- How Uboot actually works, including /boot.scr and the way the emmc uses it.
- The differences between
/dev/mmcblk0boot1, /dev/mmcblk0p1, /dev/mmcblk1p1, and how the system uses them.
- What
reform-boot-config, reform-check, reform-flash-*, and friends do.
Thanks for Your help and links! I learned a lot, and am happy to be a part of this community!