[Nix-dev] A few questions about Arm support and NixOS on a Chrome-book

[Tim Barbour]

I would also like to be able to run Nixos on ARM. I have three Raspberry Pis
(indeed an aging platform), and an MK802IV (much more powerful that the
Raspberry Pi, but a similar price).

I also would prefer to avoid x86 PC hardware in the future, the problem being
the power consumption (100-200W per box). ARM seems much better in this
regard. From a very rough estimate, I think an MK802IV has about 10% of the
processing power of a PC, for about 2.5% of the power consumption (5W max). I
think we will see the day when ARM will out-perform x86, because it will be
able to process more instructions per second without melting.

AMD is working on 64-bit server-class ARM CPUs, which will fit in PC
motherboards. I hope to use such machines in place of x86 PCs (in the future),
and to use MK802IV, or similar, for less demanding applications.

I have managed to get a Raspberry Pi up to date WRT to Nixos 13.10 (it took
about a week to build), but the current small stable channel
(nixos-14.04-small) failed on building the kernel (3.6.y in
nixos-14.04.527). I am not sure whether Nixos 13.10 is patched for recent
security fixes.

It would be really helpful if Hydra could do ARM builds, even just for the
small channels (e.g. nixos-14.04-small).

I would also like to know whether nixops can work cross-platform.

Tim