Re: Easy testing on real hardware with FSDG distributions?

[Damien Zammit]

Hi,

Concerning X200/T400/T500, these will not boot into Xorg
on HURD if any flavour of coreboot is installed.

This is because VESA is not implemented in coreboot
and there is no other working graphics driver yet.
Text mode will still function, although at an embarrassingly
low screen resolution unchanged from the coreboot framebuffer.

Joshua, it may be useful to add this info to the wiki,
as it currently contradicts what is written there.

Damien

On 10/8/24 9:51 AM, jbranso@dismail.de wrote:
> October 7, 2024 at 9:39 AM, "Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli" 
> <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org 
> mailto:GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org?to=%22Denis%20'GNUtoo'%20Carikli%22%20%3CGNUtoo%40cyberdimension.org%3E
>  > wrote:
>
>
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> The HURD wiki now mentions that the "X200, T400, or T500 Thinkpads"
>> can now run HURD[1].
>>
>> My interest in HURD at the moment is mainly to test HURD to document
>> which GNU Boot configurations can or cannot boot HURD and maybe have
>> some automatic testing done with HURD as well or if it's too much work,
>> to document the current status (cannot test hurd ourselves, in need for
>> volunteers to do that, need to wait for <foo> for testing, etc).
>>
>> Since we don't want to force GNU Boot contributors to run nonfree
>> distros, and that we can't integrate code to automatically tests with
>> nonfree distros either, our only option is either to rely on voulonteers
>> to run tests or to do the tests ourselves with FSDG distros.
>>
>> In practice we already have automatic testing with Trisquel and LVM for
>> instance, and Guix and Trisquel are also manually tested quite often
>> these days.
>>
>> So this brings my question: Is there an easy way to somehow reproduce
>> an installation of GRUB with FSDG distributions or does that still
>> require Debian?
>>
>> I'm looking for something that can potentially be automatized or
>> reproduced by following some instructions somehow, and if that doesn't
>> exist, I'm looking for a way to do that without too much work, or to
>> document the current status.
> Well, do not use the "latest" or "stable" debian hurd iso 32 images.
>
> That is any 32 bit image with the date 2023-06-08.  That 32 bit net-install
> image currently fail to boot the Hurd on the T400.  So these images do NOT 
> boot:
>
> https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/latest/hurd-i386/current/iso-cd/
> https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/stable/hurd-i386/iso-cd/
>
>
> crossinstall should work for now:
>
> https://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/hurd/running/debian/CrossInstall/
>
>
>> The two FSDG distributions that seem to have support for HURD are Guix
>> and Trisquel.
>>
>> For Guix it's well tested in VMs within the childhurd compilation
>> offload Guix service, but when running in some other configurations it
>> has several issues:
>> (1) The GRUB configuration somehow hardcodes 'hda1' as the HURD
>>   partition. On real hardware it can be worked around by identifying
>>   which partition is the right one and changing it accordingly
>>   (usually it's sda1 or sda2 depending on if there is a cdrom/dvd
>>   drive for instance). With standalone VMs this is easier to deal with
>>   than as one can just make the disk image become ATA and get rid of
>>   the issue for good.
>> (2) Guix with GRUB can only boot once on standalone VMs or on real
>>   hardware. It's a known bug and there are workarounds in the
>>   hurd-team branch in Guix. With standalone VMs the workaround is to
>>   copy the VM file before each boot but that is way more time
>>   consuming to do with real hardware.
>>
>> The combination of both issues makes it harder to test, especially if we
>> add other things in the mix like changing the boot software and/or
>> its build configuration and/or broken hardware.
>>
>> There is also Trisquel that has a crosshurd package but I've not tested
>> it yet, but it also seems to use debian's sources.list.
>>
>> So I was wondering if people had workaround for the issues above to
>> make it relatively easy to test, or if there are other paths that can
>> results in a HURD image that can be tested somehow.
>>
>> References:
>> -----------
>> [1]https://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/faq/drivers/
>>
>> Denis.
>>