[Nix-dev] Porting NixOS

[Armijn Hemel]

hi Daniel,

> I'm in the process of seeing how hard it would be to port NixOS to
> non-intel architectures / boot loaders other than grub. Specifically
> I'm working with a Loongson 2f machine, which is a mipsel64 (64-bit
> MIPS little-endian) machine that uses the PMON 2000 boot loader.

If you are thinking about cross compiling it: good luck. Cross
compilation is not very well integrated in the Nix packages collection.
Some preliminary work has been done (mainly some ARM stuff a few years
back), but we never got further than doing pure C stuff. Building of
libstdc++ in a cross environment is a challenge, which we still need to
work out. So far it has not been a priority, but I hope we can change
that.

(and don't even *think* about doing a Canadian Cross ;) )

> At the moment I'm just starting to play with the build tools - I have
> nix built, and am working on compiling nixpkgs. Before I start down a
> path of naive stupidity, I thought I'd ping the list and see if anyone
> more familiar with the project had given thought on an architecture
> that would allow NixOS to revert to previous configurations as part of
> the normal boot process, instead of via a boot loader (even if PMON
> 2000 could be made to work like grub does, I think it would be too
> annoying to have to redo that integration with every random boot
> loader out there - there are more than you would think).

On MIPS machines? Not that many :-P

I'm not too familiar with the Longsoon 2f (although I have heard some
good stuff about it). How much RAM/flash does the machine you have have?

armijn

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