[Nix-dev] Porting NixOS

[Tony White]

2009/9/10 Lluís Batlle <viriketo at gmail.com>:
> 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
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>> https://mail.cs.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
>>
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Hi Lluís,
You may want to try :
http://www.eglibc.org/home
instead of glibc. I believe that eglibc is now being used instead
glibc in debian.
glibc was forked by a debian developer because a large amount of
patches for architectures such as arm were being dismissed a lot by
Drepper (The glibc maintainer) And debian are very keen on making
their arm port as good as they can.
eglibc should therefore work much more smoothly with your arm port and
the maintainer might even accept any patches you want throw at him. :)
Hope that's useful.

Thanks,
Tony