[Nix-dev] Stripped down Linux distribution based on Nix/NixOS

[Nahum Shalman]

On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 1:32 PM, zimbatm <zimbatm at zimbatm.com> wrote:

> Do you plan on using systemd as your system init ? I mean you can still
> use nixpkgs and it would probably be useful in itself but you would need to
> generate your own activation scripts.
>
Yes we plan on using systemd, though we will most likely replace the NixOS
stage1 and stage2 code with our own code that does our customized startup
before systemd starts.

How do you plan on shipping security updates ? If the system is in the
> initrd I suppose it's immutable and requires a reboot.
>
Ship a fresh image and reboot the server. Similar to the model used by
SmartOS.


> Hydra is the CI system to use with nix.
>
Sure, but regardless of which CI system, my concern is that the Nix
expressions generally contain explicit checksums for the inputs which may
be onerous when what I really want to do is dynamically generate a set of
kernel patches from a set of git branches on a particular git repository.
I'm curious if/how people have addressed that issue.

Most likely you would have a fork of nixpkgs or an overlay that contains
> your kernel patches and also contain a release.nix to generate the whole
> system. If you have a look into nixpkgs for that file it should provide
> some enlightenment.
>
What do you mean by an overlay?


Thank you!
-Nahum
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