Hello, Recently I went through the process of building guix system images for some embedded platforms wherein the hosts were configured via PXE. I had to be very mindful Guixs existing bootloader abstractions while doing so. reading over this boot spec, I see things like the concept of bootloader components etc that would work very well for my use case(s). More a comment than anything but I would find this valuable.
Best, Patrick On Sat, Sep 12, 2026 at 8:34 PM Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli < [email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > On Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:31:23 +0400 > [email protected] wrote: > > > the main problem is that the generic bootloader interface is still > > very heavily shaped around grub: generated configuration files, menu > > entries, installer callbacks, etc. this gets especially awkward for > > generation switching, system images, and bootloaders which don't > > really fit that model. > > Is information about what the bootloader supports in scope of this GCD? > > Last time I looked, GRUB supported F2FS but u-boot didn't. This also > changes depending on the versions of GRUB, u-boot or what GRUB modules > are bundled in the GRUB images. > > The idea here would be to make 'guix system image ./my-image.scm' fail > in cases where we know that the root filesystem is incompatible with > the bootloader. > > If you use a rootfs on LVM2 and no /boot partition, u-boot also doesn't > know how to read LVM2 so it would also fail if u-boot is being used. > > And we could also add external bootloaders as well if needed (like > Libreboot / GNU Boot, where Guix generates the GRUB configuration > without installing a GRUB image) and for instance don't do any checks > in these cases. >
