Quick report…it is still no go with the text option for the minisforum.
I’ve been looking at SUSE’s tumbleweed installer (it works) which uses kernel 6.9 so I copied their linux file to the installer (and renamed to bzImage etc.) I managed to boot into the SUSE kernel and by hand I got the squashfs mounted and started constructing the nixos env…which was partially working…though I don’t remember all the steps of a rebuild switch. It was a fun rabbit hole and I’m learning a ton.
My gaze is now on investigating what’s wrong with our kernel (tried latest and 6.6.x). To that end I’m currently building the kernel (6.10) following Linux kernel - NixOS Wiki to add debugging.
I’ve not done kernel debugging in many many many years so we shall see what neurons in my mind wake up to chip in.
latest iso.nix looks like this for the curious.
{
imports = [
./nixpkgs/nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd/installation-cd-graphical-gnome.nix
# Provide an initial copy of the NixOS channel so that the user
# doesn't need to run "nix-channel --update" first.
#./nixpkgs/nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd/channel.nix
];
environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.neovim ];
boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_6_10;
boot.crashDump.enable = true;
boot.kernelPatches = [ {
name = "crashdump-config";
patch = null;
extraConfig = ''
CRASH_DUMP y
DEBUG_INFO y
PROC_VMCORE y
LOCKUP_DETECTOR y
HARDLOCKUP_DETECTOR y
'';
} ];
isoImage.forceTextMode = true;
}
Sadly I don’t think we are having any crash but just a bad state with no ui or tty.