Setting nixosVersion to something custom is useful for meaningful GRUB
menus and /nix/store paths, but actuallly changing it rebulids the
whole system path (because of `nixos-version` script and manual
pages). Also, changing it is not a particularly good idea because you
can then be differentitated from other NixOS users by a lot of
programs that read /etc/os-release.
This patch introduces an alternative option that does all you want
from nixosVersion, but rebuilds only the very top system level and
/etc while using your label in the names of system /nix/store paths,
GRUB and other boot loaders' menus, getty greetings and so on.
This commit adds the options --build-host and --target-host to nixos-rebuild.
--build-host instructs nixos-rebuild to perform all nix builds on the
specified host (via ssh). Build results are then copied back to the
local machine and used when activating the system.
--build-target instructs nixos-rebuild to activate the configuration
not on the local machine but on the specified remote host. Build
results are copied to the target machine and then activated there (via ssh).
It is possible to combine the usage of --build-host and --target-host,
in which case you can perform the build on one remote machine and deploy
the configuration to another remote machine. The only requirement is that
the build host has a working ssh connection to the target host (if the
target is not local), and that the local machine can connect to both
the target and the build host. Also, your user must be allowed to copy
nix closures between the local machine and the target and host machines.
At no point in time are the configuration sources (the nix files) copied
anywhere. Instead, nix evaluation always happens locally
(with nix-instantiate). The drv-file is then copied and realised remotely
(with nix-store).
As a convenience, if only --target-host is specified, --build-host is
implicitly set to that host too. So if you want to build locally and deploy
remotely you have to explicitly set "--build-host localhost".
To activate (test, boot or switch) you need to have root access to the
target host. You can specify this by "--target-host root@myhost".
I have tested the obvious scenarios and they are working. Some of the
combinations of --build-host and --target-host and the various actions might
not make much sense, and should maybe be forbidden (like setting a remote
target host when building a VM), and some combinations might not work at all.
We seem to be in an unfortunate situation: booting without 'nomodeset'
causes hangs when booting on some NVIDIA cards (6948c3ab80), but on the
other hand adding 'nomodeset' prevents X from starting on other hardware
(e.g. issue #10381 and my Thinkpad X250 with an integrated Broadwell GPU).
Attempt to remedy this situation a bit by adding a separate entry in the
ISOLINUX menu (with the non-'nomodeset' being the default).
The most complex problems were from dealing with switches reverted in
the meantime (gcc5, gmp6, ncurses6).
It's likely that darwin is (still) broken nontrivially.
Since commits 89e9837 and 5b8dae8 the manual no longer depends on
evaluation of any packages from nixpkgs, so all errors of the form
"Package 'foo' is not supported on 'armv7l-linux'" are gone.
mmc_block and sdhci_acpi are both necessary for a Bay Trail Chromebook with an
internal eMMC drive. The sdhci_acpi module is detectable but I can not figure
out a way to check whether the mmc_block module is needed by just looking at
/sys/
I needed to add sdhci_acpi and mmc_block to my initrd modules in order to boot
my Chromebook. Looking under /sys/class/mmc_host/*/device/driver/module will
give us the sdhci_acpi dependency.
This makes the firmware available (or would, if someone switched off
enableAllFirmware). Corresponding kernel module should get auto-loaded.
See #9948. Close#9971.
If nixos-install is run on a machine with `nix.distributedBuilds = true`
the installation will fail at some point like this:
Died at /nix/store/4frhrl31cl7iahlz6vyvysy5dmr6xnh3-nix-1.10/libexec/nix/build-remote.pl line 115, <STDIN> line 1.
This is due to `nix.distributedBuilds` setting
NIX_BUILD_HOOK=/nix/store/.../build-remote.pl in the global environment,
which then gets confused in the minimal chroot created by nixos-install.
To avoid these kinds of issues with build hooks, just disable them in
the chroot.
Avoids this warning when running `nixos-rebuild switch`:
````
building Nix...
building the system configuration...
trace: Obsolete option `services.virtualboxGuest.enable' is used. It was renamed to `virtualisation.virtualbox.guest.enable'.
````
This option requests compatibility with older NixOS releases with
respect to stateful data, in cases where new releases have defaults
that might be incompatible with system state of existing NixOS
deployments. For instance, if we change the default version of
PostgreSQL, existing deployments will break if the new version can't
read databases created by the old version.
So for example, setting
system.stateVersion = "15.07";
requests that options like services.postgresql.package use defaults
corresponding to the 15.07 release branch. Note that
nixos-generate-config emits this option. (In the future, NixOps may
set system.stateVersion to the NixOS release in use when the machine
was created.)
See also #7939 for another motivating example.
The resulting image can be copied to a SD card with `dd` and is directly
bootable by a suitably configured U-Boot. Though depending on the board, some
extra steps are required for copying U-Boot itself to the SD card.
Inside the image is a partition table, with a FAT32 /boot and a normal
writable EXT4 rootfs. It's possible to directly reuse the SD image's
partition layout and "install" NixOS on the same SD card by replacing
the default configuration.nix and nixos-rebuild, and actually is the
preferred way to use these images. To assist in this installation
method, the boot scripts on the image automatically resize the rootfs
partition to fit the SD card on the first boot.
The SD images come in two flavors; one for the ARMv6 Raspberry Pi,
and one multiplatform image for all the boards supported by the
mainline kernel's multi_v7_defconfig config target. At the moment, these
have been tested on:
- Raspberry Pi Model B (512MB model)
- NVIDIA Jetson TK1
- Linksprite pcDuino3 Nano
To build, run:
nix-build '<nixpkgs/nixos>' -A config.system.build.sdImage \
-I nixos-config='<nixpkgs/nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd/sd-image-armv7l-multiplatform.nix>'
It comes in handy to alter the menu label if you're not building a NixOS
installer image but for example if you want to build a live system and
still want to re-use the iso-image.nix module.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
Should fix at least nixos.tests.installer.simple.x86_64-linux
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/23001712:
machine# error: cannot download Encode-Locale-1.03.tar.gz from any mirror
machine# builder for ‘/nix/store/y8gbx2d2fdcvvjy1z53xksfgq66ydlx0-Encode-Locale-1.03.tar.gz.drv’ failed with exit code 1
machine# cannot build derivation ‘/nix/store/y1knci7rix3asnh2b4kfv8jhl2j99xih-perl-Encode-Locale-1.03.drv’: 1 dependencies couldn't be built
machine# cannot build derivation ‘/nix/store/7xspjwh48kg16drv1jjg5cffaqbxbp8p-perl-libwww-perl-6.05.drv’: 1 dependencies couldn't be built
machine# cannot build derivation ‘/nix/store/8qsmz3bbk1jwhh50c3i9700bkmn8ns5c-nss-cacert-3.19.1.drv’: 1 dependencies couldn't be built
machine# cannot build derivation ‘/nix/store/0rgf2l3mdszs4a989ympwc9gk2k8wq6z-nixos-artwork-e71b684.drv’: 1 dependencies couldn't be built
...
Commit 159fed47bc (nixos/grub: Fix video display on efi) changed BIOS
systems to start in non-text mode as well. Enable FB_VESA to get a
framebuffer console on BIOS systems. Change FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE to 'y'
instead of the default 'm' to so the user doesn't need to manually load
the fbcon module anymore.
Other distros have similar defaults, at least on Arch:
CONFIG_FB_VESA=y
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y
and on Ubuntu (12.04):
CONFIG_FB_VESA=m
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y
Fixes#8139
Passing the chroot flag to nixos-install without arguments should now give you a
Bash shell as intended rather than try an empty path.
This was masked by the user's shell (usually /bin/bash) being defaulted to by
chroot, and being found since their paths used NixOS conventions.
When bootstrapping from other distributions, nixos-install is unable to find
various tools in the chroot since their paths aren't aware of NixOS conventions.
This makes a small change to existing code by specifying nixpkgs/nixos instead
of just nixos when running nix-instantiate in the chroot. I haven't tested this
outside of bootstrapping, but the same specification is used elsewhere in the
code so I don't see why it wouldn't work.
This partially reverts commit 3a4fd0bfc6.
Addresses another concern by @edolstra that users might not want to
update *all* channels. We're now reverting to the old behaviour but
after updating the "nixos" channel, we just check whether the channel
ships with a file called ".update-on-nixos-rebuild" and if it exists, we
update that channel as well.
Other channels than these are not touched anymore.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
Should make it even easier to use custom channels, because whenever the
user does a "nixos-rebuild --upgrade", it will also upgrade possibly
used ("used" as in referenced in configuration.nix) channels besides
"nixos". And if you also ship a channel tied to a particular version of
nixpkgs or even remove the "nixos" channels, you won't run into
unexpected situations where the system is not updating your custom
channels.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
Fixes#6795.
This was co-authored with @bobvanderlinden.
(cherry picked from commit e19ac248ae59fd327c32b1ae3e37792c22a7c7ac)
Signed-off-by: Domen Kožar <domen@dev.si>
Conflicts:
nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd/iso-image.nix
There are a number of hidden restrictions on the syslinux
configuration file that come into play when UNetbootin
compatiblity is desired. With this commit these are documented.
This changes the bootloader for iso generation from Grub to
syslinux. In addition this adds USB booting support, so that
"dd" can be used to burn the generated ISO to USB thumbdrives
instead of needing applications like UnetBootin.
The nixbld group doesn't need read permission, it only needs write and
execute permission.
(cherry picked from commit 066758758e7c0768ff8da51d208cdae0f33b368c)
‘nixos-rebuild dry-activate’ builds the new configuration and then
prints what systemd services would be stopped, restarted etc. if the
configuration were actually activated. This could be extended later to
show other activation actions (like uids being deleted).
To prevent confusion, ‘nixos-rebuild dry-run’ has been renamed to
‘nixos-rebuild dry-build’.
Since we're using HTTPS for the binary cache (introduced in faf0797) by
default, the binary cache should also be available during installation.
The file that is defined in SSL_CERT_FILE outside of the chroot is
copied over to /tmp/ca-cert.crt inside the chroot, so we have an
absolute path we can reference during nixos-install. However, this might
end up with the file not being cleaned up properly from outside of the
store, but neither would be /tmp/root so the cleanup issue needs to be
solved in another place (or commit to be more exact).
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
Especially new users could be confused by this, so we're now marking
services.virtualbox.enable as obsolete and defaulting to
services.virtualboxGuest.enable instead. I believe this now makes it
clear, that this option is for guest additions only.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
The NixOS manual says modules have the following signature:
{ config, lib, pkgs, ... }:
But our generated configuration.nix file lacks the 'lib' part. Add it.
The host id value gets generated by reading a 32-bit value from
/dev/urandom.
This makes programs that rely on a correct host id more reliable.
It also makes using ZFS more seamless, as you don't need to configure
the hostId manually; instead, it becomes part of your config from the
moment you install NixOS.
The old boot.spl.hostid option was not working correctly due to an
upstream bug.
Instead, now we will create the /etc/hostid file so that all applications
(including the ZFS kernel modules, ZFS user-space applications and other
unrelated programs) pick-up the same system-wide host id. Note that glibc
(and by extension, the `hostid` program) also respect the host id configured in
/etc/hostid, if it exists.
The hostid option is now mandatory when using ZFS because otherwise, ZFS will
require you to force-import your ZFS pools if you want to use them, which is
undesirable because it disables some of the checks that ZFS does to make sure it
is safe to import a ZFS pool.
The /etc/hostid file must also exist when booting the initrd, before the SPL
kernel module is loaded, so that ZFS picks up the hostid correctly.
The complexity in creating the /etc/hostid file is due to having to
write the host ID as a 32-bit binary value, taking into account the
endianness of the machine, while using only shell commands and/or simple
utilities (to avoid exploding the size of the initrd).
This changes the bootloader for iso generation from Grub to
syslinux. In addition this adds USB booting support, so that
"dd" can be used to burn the generated ISO to USB thumbdrives
instead of needing applications like UnetBootin.
This reverts commit 469f22d717, reversing
changes made to 0078bc5d8f.
Conflicts:
nixos/modules/installer/tools/nixos-generate-config.pl
nixos/modules/system/boot/loader/grub/install-grub.pl
nixos/release.nix
nixos/tests/installer.nix
I tried to keep apparently-safe code in conflicts.
Should bring most of the examples into a better consistency regarding
syntactic representation in the manual.
Thanks to @devhell for reporting.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
On some non-NixOS systems (for example those using "resolvconf"),
/etc/resolv.conf is a symlink. So let's dereference when copying hasts
and resolv.conf.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
An escape char is needed to prevent "$ nix" from being evaluated and
expanded to an empty string. With this change the resulting text is
$ nix-env -qaP | grep wget
instead of
-env -qaP | grep wget
When formatting a nixos usb using my windows machine I noticed that the
disk labeling using periods was not compatible with my linux kernel /
udev recognition. When labeling a volume NIXOS_14.10 under Windows, it would
show up as NIXOS_14_10 on NixOS. This meant that /dev/root would never come
up at boot time, preventing the livecd from starting.
This patch works around this issue by eliminating any special characters
other than underscores. The previous versioning didn't seem all that
useful, especially when consdering there are many different version of
the year.month named iso.
"nixos-install --chroot" runs a command (by default a login shell) in
a chroot inside the NixOS installation in /mnt. This might useful for
poking around a new installation.
Dmidecode fails in our EFI test with the error "SMBIOS entry point
missing". But we don't need dmidecode because we have already have
systemd-detect-virt.
Fixes#2379.
The new name was a misnomer because the values really are X11 video
drivers (e.g. ‘cirrus’ or ‘nvidia’), not OpenGL implementations. That
it's also used to set an OpenGL implementation for kmscon is just
confusing overloading.
Previously, if the currently installed Nix is too old to evaluate
Nixpkgs, then nixos-rebuild would fail and the user had to upgrade Nix
manually. Now, as a fallback, we run ‘nix-store -r’ to obtain a binary
Nix directly from the binary cache.
This allows doing any necessary actions that were not in the installed
nixos-rebuild (such as downloading a new version of Nix). This does
require us to be careful that nixos-rebuild is backwards-compatible
(i.e. can run in any old installation).
Using pkgs.lib on the spine of module evaluation is problematic
because the pkgs argument depends on the result of module
evaluation. To prevent an infinite recursion, pkgs and some of the
modules are evaluated twice, which is inefficient. Using ‘with lib’
prevents this problem.
We don't want to hardcode configuration options that the current kernel chose
for us when mounting the filesystem, since the defaults can change in the
future.
IIUC, <nixos> is going to be deprecated someday in the future, and as
most of those references are already replaced I guess it's safe to
replace it here as well, as it is only relevant on new/updated
installations.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
It's already set in hardware-configuration.nix so this just confuses
people.
Also get rid of boot.initrd.kernelModules, since
hardware-configuration.nix is supposed to figure that out as well.
Commit 31203732b3 dropped the reference to
<nixos> from NIX_PATH (nixos/modules/programs/environment.nix) and thus
prevents systems that are not using channels from rebuilding.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
So, we get the old behaviour of nixos-hardware-scane if we run the
following command:
nixos-generate-config --no-filesystems --show-hardware-config
This allows to use scripts in order to fetch NixOS specific hardware
information, without the need to duplicate code elsewhere.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
The attributes swapDevices and imports add a space character after the
eqals sign, which is unnecessary. I know, I'm a pedantic douche bag but
it hurts my eyes.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
This is to get back the old behavior of nixos-hardware-scan, which
didn't include fileSystems and swapDevices.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
If this option is given, nixos-generate-config will write the
configuration to /etc/nixos under the given root, and only emit
fileSystems attributes for filesystems under the given root directory.
The typically use case is at installation time, where you can say:
$ nixos-generate-config --root /mnt
which will create /mnt/etc/nixos/{configuration.nix,hardware-configuration.nix}.
Also add a --force flag to force overwriting configuration.nix.
Having configuration.nix generation hidden underneath nixos-option
never made sense, also given that there was another command to
generate part of the configuration (nixos-hardware-scan). Now
nixos-generate-config produces both configuration.nix and
hardware-configuration.nix. The latter is overwritten while the
former is not.
