The resulting image can be copied to a SD card with `dd` and is directly
bootable by a suitably configured U-Boot. Though depending on the board, some
extra steps are required for copying U-Boot itself to the SD card.
Inside the image is a partition table, with a FAT32 /boot and a normal
writable EXT4 rootfs. It's possible to directly reuse the SD image's
partition layout and "install" NixOS on the same SD card by replacing
the default configuration.nix and nixos-rebuild, and actually is the
preferred way to use these images. To assist in this installation
method, the boot scripts on the image automatically resize the rootfs
partition to fit the SD card on the first boot.
The SD images come in two flavors; one for the ARMv6 Raspberry Pi,
and one multiplatform image for all the boards supported by the
mainline kernel's multi_v7_defconfig config target. At the moment, these
have been tested on:
- Raspberry Pi Model B (512MB model)
- NVIDIA Jetson TK1
- Linksprite pcDuino3 Nano
To build, run:
nix-build '<nixpkgs/nixos>' -A config.system.build.sdImage \
-I nixos-config='<nixpkgs/nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd/sd-image-armv7l-multiplatform.nix>'
It comes in handy to alter the menu label if you're not building a NixOS
installer image but for example if you want to build a live system and
still want to re-use the iso-image.nix module.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
Should fix at least nixos.tests.installer.simple.x86_64-linux
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/23001712:
machine# error: cannot download Encode-Locale-1.03.tar.gz from any mirror
machine# builder for ‘/nix/store/y8gbx2d2fdcvvjy1z53xksfgq66ydlx0-Encode-Locale-1.03.tar.gz.drv’ failed with exit code 1
machine# cannot build derivation ‘/nix/store/y1knci7rix3asnh2b4kfv8jhl2j99xih-perl-Encode-Locale-1.03.drv’: 1 dependencies couldn't be built
machine# cannot build derivation ‘/nix/store/7xspjwh48kg16drv1jjg5cffaqbxbp8p-perl-libwww-perl-6.05.drv’: 1 dependencies couldn't be built
machine# cannot build derivation ‘/nix/store/8qsmz3bbk1jwhh50c3i9700bkmn8ns5c-nss-cacert-3.19.1.drv’: 1 dependencies couldn't be built
machine# cannot build derivation ‘/nix/store/0rgf2l3mdszs4a989ympwc9gk2k8wq6z-nixos-artwork-e71b684.drv’: 1 dependencies couldn't be built
...
Commit 159fed47bc (nixos/grub: Fix video display on efi) changed BIOS
systems to start in non-text mode as well. Enable FB_VESA to get a
framebuffer console on BIOS systems. Change FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE to 'y'
instead of the default 'm' to so the user doesn't need to manually load
the fbcon module anymore.
Other distros have similar defaults, at least on Arch:
CONFIG_FB_VESA=y
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y
and on Ubuntu (12.04):
CONFIG_FB_VESA=m
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y
Fixes#8139
Fixes#6795.
This was co-authored with @bobvanderlinden.
(cherry picked from commit e19ac248ae59fd327c32b1ae3e37792c22a7c7ac)
Signed-off-by: Domen Kožar <domen@dev.si>
Conflicts:
nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd/iso-image.nix
There are a number of hidden restrictions on the syslinux
configuration file that come into play when UNetbootin
compatiblity is desired. With this commit these are documented.
This changes the bootloader for iso generation from Grub to
syslinux. In addition this adds USB booting support, so that
"dd" can be used to burn the generated ISO to USB thumbdrives
instead of needing applications like UnetBootin.
The old boot.spl.hostid option was not working correctly due to an
upstream bug.
Instead, now we will create the /etc/hostid file so that all applications
(including the ZFS kernel modules, ZFS user-space applications and other
unrelated programs) pick-up the same system-wide host id. Note that glibc
(and by extension, the `hostid` program) also respect the host id configured in
/etc/hostid, if it exists.
The hostid option is now mandatory when using ZFS because otherwise, ZFS will
require you to force-import your ZFS pools if you want to use them, which is
undesirable because it disables some of the checks that ZFS does to make sure it
is safe to import a ZFS pool.
The /etc/hostid file must also exist when booting the initrd, before the SPL
kernel module is loaded, so that ZFS picks up the hostid correctly.
The complexity in creating the /etc/hostid file is due to having to
write the host ID as a 32-bit binary value, taking into account the
endianness of the machine, while using only shell commands and/or simple
utilities (to avoid exploding the size of the initrd).
This changes the bootloader for iso generation from Grub to
syslinux. In addition this adds USB booting support, so that
"dd" can be used to burn the generated ISO to USB thumbdrives
instead of needing applications like UnetBootin.
Should bring most of the examples into a better consistency regarding
syntactic representation in the manual.
Thanks to @devhell for reporting.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
