Would it be helpful to test this on hardware? I have a UEFI aarch64 machine I could try booting it on, though I believe it still needs patches not yet in mainline Linux.
— Ian On December 22, 2025 11:18:12 AM PST, Rutherther <[email protected]> wrote: > >Hey Guix, > >I have been getting Guix ready to be able to generate AArch64 installer >iso image and qcow2 vm image. During this I reworked some parts of how >images are generated and related things, namely: > >- Images currently remove /boot/efi from file-systems of > operating-system, I have added it back so it gets mounted > >The rationale for this has been that the generated images might not >boot, when you specify the /boot/efi device wrongly, ie. the case in >desktop.tmpl. I added it back, because you cannot reconfigure EFI system >without esp mounted. But I have specified the correct label, according >to the esp. So boot is fine now. > >In case you wanted to test this for qcow2 images, use newly available >qcow2-gpt that is part of the PR. Or you could use efi-raw. > >- For iso9660, bootloader was unconditionally replaced with mkrescue > bootloader, I have conditioned this with grub-hybrid being > supported-package, it isn't for AArch64. (specifically grub-pc is not) > >The iso is bootable in QEMU and real hardware even with this change. >What makes it use mkrescue mode of grub is make-iso9660-image in (gnu >build image), not the bootloader being grub-mkrescue. That just helps us >to get both EFI and Legacy BIOS support. > >- I have changed %default-xorg-modules to depend on the system > >Similarly to how %desktop-service or %base-initrd-modules do. This is >because a package in them is not supported on AArch64. >%default-xorg-modules typically go to services that is thunked, so I >don't expect any problems. > >- I have added virtio_mmio and virtio_scsi to base-initrd-modules > >This is to support virtio-blk and virtio-scsi-pci on VMs by default, >Other virtio modules are already added, so it felt right adding them >here. > >On x86_64, these can be used, while on AArch64 they are pretty much >necessary for any disks (either one or the other). > >-- > >I would be interested if someone has any notes about setups this could >potentially break. I cannot think of any, but if you are experienced >with some non-regular setups, it would help to know. So I hope this will >be just welcome improvements and not otherwise. > >I am not going to merge this to master for couple more days, but then I >was planning to, so it would be great to know if there is something this >could break beforehand, to fix it beforehand. > >Here is the PR: <https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/pulls/4591> > >Rutherther >
