NixOS aarch64 images

Build aarch64 images for ARM single board computer that require custom uboot firmware. It re-uses pre-build NixOS installation images, so it can be also built on non aarch64 architectures.

Example

$ nix-build -A rock64 # for regular Rock64
$ nix-build -A rockPro64 # for RockPro64
$ sfdisk --dump result
label: gpt
label-id: 0493C426-ACD9-9843-9C4B-268C90698145
device: result
unit: sectors
first-lba: 64
last-lba: 5505943
sector-size: 512

result1 : start=          64, size=       16320, type=0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4, uuid=87A01291-DFAE-A54F-BB22-731A4A07FE78, name="idbloader"
result2 : start=       16384, size=       16384, type=0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4, uuid=34FAD60D-02BE-514E-BA65-80550BAACEF3, name="uboot"
result3 : start=       32768, size=     5473176, type=0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4, uuid=B4283CE4-FC2F-6942-A542-ABDFB5DC7668, name="nixos", attrs="LegacyBIOSBootable"

Built images can be than copied to sdcards etc as usual:

$ sudo dd if=./result of=/dev/mmcblk0 iflag=direct oflag=direct bs=16M status=progress

Replace /dev/mmcblk0 with your actual device.

Flakes support

Flakes support is also provided. This repository has no dependencies except for nixpkgs, however we do not provide a lock file which means that one will be created using your system if you pull down the repo. This lets you use an up-to-date uboot at whatever level of stability you are already comfortable with.

To build the rockPro64 image without pulling down the repo, use:

nix build --no-write-lock-file 'github:Mic92/nixos-aarch64-images#rockPro64'

To build the rockPro64 image without pulling down the repo and switching nixpkgs with nixpkgs-unstable:

nix build --no-write-lock-file --override-input nixpkgs github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixpkgs-unstable 'github:Mic92/nixos-aarch64-images#rockPro64'

Of course, you can replace rockPro64 with any of the outputs included in this flake. To see the outputs, you can invoke nix flake show:

❯ nix flake show
git+file:///home/user/git/nixos-aarch64-images
└───packages
    └───x86_64-linux
        ├───aarch64Image: package 'aarch64-image'
        ├───pinebookPro: package 'image'
        ├───roc-pc-rk3399: package 'image'
        ├───rock64: package 'image'
        └───rockPro64: package 'image'

Supported boards

Add a new board

See images/rockchip.nix for an example. All options are defined in here;

Board wishlist

Allwinner boards have their bootloader in a free space after mbr:

https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Template:ARM/installation_allwinner