I’m experiencing very strange behaviour. I’m trying to install NixOS on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. It works fine, I can ssh into the board or use it with a keyboard and a screen, but the board won’t boot without a connected screen. If I try to start the board without a screen, I cannot ssh into it. Then, if i plug a screen to it, the boot menu shows, and the board starts kernel etc. After this I can ssh into it normally. Does someone know how to troubleshoot this? Here’s my config:
This is a firmware problem. I don’t know what state is with more recent firmware versions, but using an older firmware fixed it for me back when I had it:
Yeah, I’ve run into this in the past with other distributions. I currently use the UEFI firmware from the Pi Firmware Task Force to run my Pi 3B+ headless, which works pretty well and lets you use the normal infrastructure for setting up on a UEFI-based device.
This is a “one-off” action — the firmware is never updated by NixOS itself, only written once on image creation. It’s also not necessary if you start from an image with working firmware and upgrade from there.