[Nix-dev] Porting NixOS

[Lluís Batlle]

Btw, I'm caring on the port to the Sheevaplug (arm + u-boot). Many
things already work from nixpkgs stdenvLinux, but I still can't
recreate bootstrapfiles (dietlibc doesn't work in arm-eabi, I may try
with glibc there). I don't work intensively at all on that, but I
don't use the Sheevaplug for any other task, and I don't plan to,
until I get a minimum NixOS there working.

I plan to write u-boot related code in nixos in order to manage the
boot of previous configurations. I don't think it will be very
difficult. u-boot doesn't show any menu easily, but can be stopped
from auto-boot on timeout, and then having set some easy-to-find
u-boot ready scripts for each system generation, an experienced user
should be able to easily boot an old config.

Regards,
Lluís.

2008/10/15 Daniel Clark <dclark at pobox.com>:
> 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.
>
> 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).
>
> I'd also like to know if there is any interest amongst the NixOS
> developers to make NixOS a distribution that would be compliant with
> the FSF/GNU Project's Guidelines for Free System Distributions [1] and
> thus recommendable by the Free Software Foundation, and if not if
> there would be any major objections to someone creating a NixOS
> variant that would be (as far as I can tell the Nix package management
> system would make such a fork much less disruptive and able to give
> back to core NixOS than other package management systems).
>
> Specifically I'm looking for an operating system that is a better
> candidate for the port described above than gNewSense. The technical
> problem of the gNewSense GNU/Linux / Debian build infrastructure being
> significantly less pretty than Nix is in theory fixable [2,3], but the
> political problem of gNewSense being based on Ubuntu, and
> Ubuntu/Canonical having little interest in creating and maintaining
> ports to less-mainstream architectures seems less surmountable.
>
> I also think that Nix is just better suited than Debian for a
> operating system for people who really, really care about using only
> Free Software (think rms), as it looks like it is provable that a
> piece of software is derived only from other pieces of free software,
> and also possible to easily audit a distribution to make sure binaries
> that are not actually derivable from available free software sources
> are not included.
>
> BTW I added the 3 nix-related projects that weren't in ohloh to ohloh
> [4]; I forget which 3 they were, but in general core nix developers
> might want to go and take management ownership of the projects.
>
> [1] FSF/GNU Project Guidelines for Free System Distributions
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
>
> [2] ohloh: gNewSense Builder
> http://www.ohloh.net/projects/gnewsense-builder
>
> [3] gNewSense Official Website: Builder / Builder
> http://www.gnewsense.org/index.php?n=Builder.Builder
>
> [4] ohloh: Search Projects: nix
> http://www.ohloh.net/projects/search?q=nix
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Daniel JB Clark # http://opensysadmin.com
> _______________________________________________
> nix-dev mailing list
> nix-dev at cs.uu.nl
> https://mail.cs.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
>