[Nix-dev] NixOS on embedded systems

[Evgeny Egorochkin]

On Saturday 17 July 2010 14:27:36 Lluís Batlle i Rossell wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> we talked about the defeat of putting Nixos into a small system. For
> example, a router (12MB of RAM, 8MB of flash, for example, where OpenWrt
> works fine), or the Ben Nanonote (2GB of flash, 32MB of RAM).
> 
> I have the idea that NixOS expressions usually don't need a compiler, but
> NixOS relies on the nixpkgs expressions that need a compiler. So we could
> use in NixOS not the nixpkgs stdenv to create some text files, but a
> simpler stdenv without compilers.
> Then, as NixOS does need nixpkgs attributes, we could try to have a tool
> generating a nixpkgs attribute tree that would be composed not of
> "stdenv.mkDerivation" derivations, but of "fetchurl-like" derivations that
> would grab the files as stated in MANIFESTs nowadays.

My anecdotal evidence suggests that gcc is not the only problem. I saw nixos-
rebuild fail with out of memory error in an OpenVZ container with 256M of RAM 
while it was evaluating the config.
-- 
Evgeny