Not booting on 8GB RPi4

[ajlennon]

Hi,

Love the docker container idea. I switched the package branch to master and changed over to the ./rpi4 config

But when I write to SD card and boot I just get the boot colour screen

I tried flashing both with etcher and dd..

Any advice? Thanks,

Alex

[Robertof]

Hey! Huge apologies for the delay in getting back to you -- this has been an incredibly busy period!

Did you manage to sort this out? This is weird, I'd expect the image to work on the Pi 4 with 8 gigs of RAM. Did you try the latest official unstable build from NixOS' hydra? If you could do that and ascertain that it works, we can see what we need to tweak to sort it out!

[ajlennon]

Hi there! No I tried all sorts of different permutations. I did in the end get a different image booting but when I tried to do the rebuilding it no longer booted. I spend ages looking at different conversations on the inter-webs but nothing worked.

I have the board here though. I'll go back and try the latest unstable build as you suggest and let you know!

[luizirber]

This comment fixed the boot problem for me: add 8250.nr_uarts=1 to the cmdline/boot params.

[Robertof]

Excellent, thank you so much! I suppose adding it here will make the image work?

https://github.com/Robertof/nixos-docker-sd-image-builder/blob/03359cbe7114901abe4f935fc1e633d9c8746b8f/config/rpi4/default.nix#L25

[luizirber]

Excellent, thank you so much! I suppose adding it here will make the image work?

In the end I changed a bit more to get the current nixpkgs master branch to compile:

  boot.kernelParams = [
    "console=tty1"
    "console=ttyAMA0,115200"
    "8250.nr_uarts=1"
  ];

  boot.initrd.availableKernelModules = [
    # Allows early (earlier) modesetting for the Raspberry Pi
    "vc4" "bcm2835_dma" "i2c_bcm2835"
  ];

I removed cma=64M (because it is also mentioned in that github issue as a problem), and fixed avaliableKernelModules because the base aarch64 image sets some modules which are not available (which is the reason why the rpi4 image is not building in hydra: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/111683)

[sciamp]

Excellent, thank you so much! I suppose adding it here will make the image work?

In the end I changed a bit more to get the current nixpkgs master branch to compile:

  boot.kernelParams = [
    "console=tty1"
    "console=ttyAMA0,115200"
    "8250.nr_uarts=1"
  ];

  boot.initrd.availableKernelModules = [
    # Allows early (earlier) modesetting for the Raspberry Pi
    "vc4" "bcm2835_dma" "i2c_bcm2835"
  ];

I removed cma=64M (because it is also mentioned in that github issue as a problem), and fixed avaliableKernelModules because the base aarch64 image sets some modules which are not available (which is the reason why the rpi4 image is not building in hydra: NixOS/nixpkgs#111683)

removing cma=64M and adding 8250.nr_uarts=1 did the trick for my rpi4 (8GB)

thanks @luizirber !

and also many thanks to @Robertof for making this project 🙏🏻

[Robertof]

Thanks for the valuable feedback everyone! I'll proceed to upstream your suggested changes in the RPI 4 configuration, then close the PR. Feel free to reopen at any time if this issue reoccurs after I push the changes!