Nixos

[zarMarco]

Hi all, tonight I've installed nixos with zfs, but with grub because I didn't found zfsbootmenu for nixos. Is it possible to create a package for this distribution?

[ahesford]

This comes up from time to time, but I think NixOS users will have a difficult time making ZBM work because our assumptions about boot environments seem at odds with Nix's desire to place things elsewhere. I'm not sure about the specifics, because I've only played with NixOS a bit, and long before I started thinking about ZFS.

As for the packaging itself, that's a question better addressed by Nix people.

[zarMarco]

Ok, now I ask on nixos forum

[hbsnmyj]

I played around with NixOS, and used a workaround of:

• Copying nix kernels with newer generations (/nix/store/hash...Linux-version/bzImage, and corresponding initramfs to /boot
• Manually set kernel command properties to point to the newest nix init (/nix/store/hash...init)

I think NixOS will work very well with the general idea of boot environments. we can view each new nix os generation as a bootable kernel version under the same BE, a (kernel, initramfs, kernel arguments) tuple. The problem is ZFSBootMenu cannot recognize it right now. Wondering if there are a suitable place to add some sort of hook/ZFS properties that discovers/captures this information to zbm.

The advantages to the user would be:

• Not need to mess with a separate bootloader for NixOS.
• Supporting native encryption without bpool.
• Rollback/Debug functionality of ZBM is still useful as not necessarily all nix configuration updates are hermetic.