[Nix-dev] Cross Compiling for Raspberry PI

[Lluís Batlle i Rossell]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 11:08:43AM +0400, Sergey Mironov wrote:
> 2013/3/18 Lluís Batlle i Rossell <viric at viric.name>
> > Sorry, I missed the last points of the discussion about cross-compiling for the
> > pi. What's the issue?
> 
> Right, I am talking about cross-compiling, not native building. Looks
> like it is not a simple task, but luckily my idea is not to build
> whole NixOS in that way (as I wrote in my previous letter, sorry for
> that). Actually, I'd be happy to get the following:
> 1) cross-toolchain (I feel I know how to build it already)
> 2) the kernel + bootloader (actually, do I need to build a bootloader?
> can RPi boot the kernel directly?)
> 3) busybox
> 4) several other packages, preferably, a webserver
> (Note, that on this stage I don't need nix-env running on a device.)
> 
> Then I'd like to develop a method to flash the SD with the binaries, I
> think it could be much like preparing an iso image. And I am not
> familiar with RPi's booting process. wiki says that there is a
> situation with vfat.. still I hope that setting up busybox should be
> possible, is it?

The only cross-built nix-based whole-OS I know is the nanonixos:
http://viric.name/cgi-bin/nanonixos/

I don't touch it since long. It's a very simple system, and prepares an ubifs
image.

> Cool, I didn't notice that, thanks! I see, the mainline solution is to
> go and build natively and to setup a distcc to speedup the process. Do
> we have full-featured nix-env/nix-store running on the device that
> way?

Sure, but that's a natively built system.

I'm building a new image these days, to match nixpkgs master.

Regards,
Lluís.