Notices by Wilko (theesm@social.tchncs.de)

@cwebber SeL4 looks pretty cool! wdyt of capsicum (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/) that seems to be used in BSDland? I don't know enough about it specifically, but it has been on my radar for a while & it could also be something worth looking into as it seems to go into a good direction?

As we only rely on the an extlinux.conf in /boot for having u-boot boot guix on the pocket, we could get away with something like:

(bootloader
(inherit extlinux-bootloader)
(package #f)
(installer (populate-boot-from-extlinux-conf))
(configuration-file "/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf")
(configuration-file-generator extlinux-configuration-file))

this as a bootloader declaration, and replace the installer function with something that populates /boot based on the extlinux.confs that are in store.

looking good so far:

root@minimal-arm ~# ls /boot/gnu/store/
0d2kfhhysw4df1yqix9mwgj76r1dvz1d-raw-initrd
0ldn74bwsam2szriw62wnms38aygxf09-linux-libre-arm64-generic-6.17.13

so let's test it with an encrypted rootfs & unencrypted /boot.

i have no idea if this will actually work outside of qemu, but at least it's something fun to hack on

i should document my aarch64 guix + bootloader test setup somewhere, used it with barebox, which is not yet upstreamed as a package, and u-boot so far, and it's super comfortable

to follow up on my weekend shenanigans, I wrote a blog post on "Diffing and Comparing Guix Derivations Using Breadth-first Search & Jaccard" and pushed to theesm/diff-drv (on codeberg) in case someone else finds this useful.

https://me.literatelisp.eu/hacklog-diffing-and-comparing-guix-derivations-using-breadth-first-search--jaccard.html

#guix

i think it's beautiful that every upgrade of a rust application *has* to include at least one ASCII art homage to an F-Zero vehicle* in its tree diff

* if anyone wants to take guesses which one is shown here -> https://mutecity.org/wiki/Machine

@janneke @guix @nlnet this is awesome news, congrats!

did some evening hacking on my derivation diff utility and experimented with the output format a bit more. It now shows whether an input has been added, removed or updated and if updated whether that's because of a version bump (v) or a hash change without a version bump (h). Haven't pushed the current version to codeberg yet, as I'm still trying out new ideas, learning about more and more #guix internals that simplify what I'm trying to do along the way, and the codebase is a mess because of that! (hope to abandon this hacky learning project utility in favor of a prospective guix store diff command in guix proper one day)

@abcdw there have been efforts in that direction already by @cbaines see https://yhetil.org/guix-devel/87cysqn2ko.fsf@cbaines.net/

not needing c++ etc. during bootstrapping guix would be pretty huge

@jfred @cwebber there's also a pull request to include a basic mnt reform image in guix proper now https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/pulls/5973 (which boots as long as stock u-boot is present on eMMC/provided somewhere else as we can't include that in guix) ... (all credits should go to Vagrant though for upstreaming all the MNT things to guix proper so this actually works)

shared my notes on setting up #guix system on a mnt pocket reform in a post if anyone's interested in doing so as well: https://me.literatelisp.eu/installing-and-running-guix-system-on-rk3588-mnt-pocket-reform.html

@cwebber i have guix system running on my pocket from nvme (which is possible with the latest u-boot for pocket), my config isn't on a public git forge yet but if you want to i could help you or anyone interested in this getting things up and running at guix days

started hacking on a proof-of-concept-ish proced-like monitor for shepherd services as I thought having a way to start/stop/monitor services from within emacs would, in theory, be a cool thing... right now this talks to shepherds socket directly (as I don't know a better way to fetch the info) and parses the response in the most ugly way possible (which is good enough for now as it works lol) to display a basic set of information on services as a tabulated list. Maybe I'll put this on codeberg if I spend a few more hours hacking on it.

#guix

@cwebber ngl that interview is probably the best thing I’ve read in months - such an awesome and cool person! thanks for sharing it