NixOS on ARM/Tinker Board
| NixOS on TinkerBoard | |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | ASUS |
| Architecture | ARMv7 |
| Bootloader | Upstream u-boot |
| Maintainer | tomberek |
Status
 |
This article or section is out of date.
Reason: Section refers to old user-provided images. Should be reviewed with cross-compilation, or native compilation through userspace emulation. (Discuss in Talk:NixOS on ARM/Tinker Board#)
Once the page has been updated this notice can be removed. |
@dezgeg's porting efforts to ARMv7 works on the TinkerBoard, with some modification for u-boot and DTB paths. Support for this board is a work in progress. Please contact me (@tomberek) for comments/thoughts/feedback/etc.
Board-specific installation notes
First follow the generic installation steps to get the installer image on an SD card.
The Tinker Board seems to look for U-Boot at a specific offset rather than in a file. So copy the initial 4MB from the TinkerOS image and then copy it to the NixOS image while skipping the MBR/partition table in the first 512 bytes. It turns out the bootstrap section of the MBR is also needed, so copy that as well.
These commands may use either the /dev/sdX or the file images and later copied to SD cards - this was discovered iteratively, thus was performed on the sd cards directly. Use with caution. (Assumes /dev/sdc is TinkerOS and /dev/sdb is NixOS images or devices respectively).
dd if=/dev/sdc of=tinker_sector bs=512k count=8 status=progress # grab tinker initial sectors
dd if=tinker_sector of=/dev/sdb bs=512 skip=1 seek=1 count=8191 # copy the img and env blobs
dd of=/dev/sdb if=tinker_sector bs=428 count=1 # bootstrap code from begining of MBR
It turns out that getting into U-Boot using the TinkerOS image, halting the boot process, replacing SD cards with the NixOS image fails, but the error message suggests the extlinux merely has a different name for the DTB than NixOS has packaged. Simply copy from the nixos dtb file `/boot/nixos/<hash>-dtbs/rk3288-tinker.dtb` to `rockchip-tinker_rk3288.dtb`.
Then, install using the installation and configuration steps.
Serial console
Your configuration.nix will need to modify the default boot.kernelParams configuration to use the serial console.
/etc/nixos/configuration.nix
boot.kernelParams = [
"console=ttymxc0,115200n8" # HDMI?
"console=tty0" # Primary Console?
"console=ttyS1,115200n8" # Serial port?
"console=ttyS2,115200n8" # Serial port pins 8+10
];
TODO
- Build U-boot from upstream
- upload images/blobs
- host binary cache