Upstreaming kernel in nixpkgs.

[Mic92]

I also recently got a rock64 board.
What do you think about upstreaming the kernel in nixpkgs?
We plan to provide official support for aarch64 in nixos starting with the next release.

[thefloweringash]

I'd love to upstream the entire thing to the point that hydra produces an sd image that boots out of the box. There's a bit of polishing work in making the ext4 filesystem with integrated /boot, making gpt formatted images, and careful reading of distribution terms for arm trusted firmware and binary blobs from Rockchip ("rkbin").

As for the kernel, it's entirely ayufan's work with configuration tweaks to make nix build. I'm happy for my comparatively small efforts to be upstreamed. Is it a problem that it's based on linux/kernel/manual-config.nix, and not linux/kernel/generic.nix?

[Mic92]

I would first open the pull request with linux/kernel/manual-config.nix and then we can discuss, if we can make the kernel expressions flexible enough to support the changes we need for this kernel or if leave it as it is.

[Mic92]

If rkbin is not re-distributable this would be indeed a problem. We can mark it as non-free, but if it has to be included in the download image for booting, then we cannot build in on hydra.

[Mic92]

Any updates on this?

[prusnak]

Hey! I recently got RockPro64 and ended up with the following:

prusnak/nixpkgs@fdddc55

Lots of stuff is already in the master (such as recent U-Boot that supports RockPro64 without any proprietary code, etc.)

I would love to see the support for Rock64 in nixpkgs master, but my knowledge is a little bit small for this. If some of you could help with combining the sd-image-rock64.nix from my repo with the sd-image-rockchip.nix presented in this repo, the goal is not very far.

[prusnak]

I opened a PR to get the kernel in nixpkgs: NixOS/nixpkgs#86007

sd-image-rock64.nix will come in a subsequent PR.