When building kexec-based installer every mb saved will reduce the RAM usage and allow to install NixOS on smaller machines.
It also means that less data has to be downloaded from the network.
When using flakes or niv we no longer rely on nix channels beeing present
and when using something like nixos-anywhere, we no longer need to evaluate anything in the installer at all.
This script would always "detect" the "powersave" governor as it is available on
practically all CPUs while the "ondemand" governor is only available on some old
CPUs.
IME the "powersave" governor barely provides any power savings but introduces
massive performance deficits, including noticable stuttering. This is not the
default experience we should offer users, even for those who use laptops.
Use the kernel default (currently "performance", CPU makers may change it in
future) instead.
[Motivation](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/257817#issuecomment-1741705042):
- Having all the XKB options in the same attribute set clarifies their
relation better than using a common option name prefix ("xkb").
- `services.xserver.layout` is an XKB option, but this is not obvious
from its name. Putting it with the other XKB options clarifies this.
Co-authored-by: Michele Guerini Rocco <rnhmjoj@users.noreply.github.com>
Relying on the built-in UEFI console here was already necessary, so we
are losing nothing by removing the needless `serial` call, which hung
some systems.
This also makes the implementation much easier to understand.
Also, no ugly-font menu anymore!
This helps keep logic simpler, as what we do is forcing text mode, which
means the non-default case is `truthy`, making things easier to digest
in the config file.
Also renaming this option is considered "internal", since it lives only
within the `iso-image` namespace, and also not a breaking change since
it was not part of a stable release.
Which ***anyway*** was not disabled correctly. Following changes will
actually disable it.
What this did was disable the "themed" menu driver, but still continued
relying on the gfxterm infra, which in itself is why things were ugly
and weird.
The `serial` console hangs on some systems. Unknown why.
Anyway, the way this worked right now relied on it telling the user on
the UEFI console how to enable it. So if I understand it correctly, it
will not cause any regression there.
- Move contents of README.md from
nixos/modules/installer/tools/manpages/ to
nixos/doc/manual/contributing-to-this-manual.chapter.md.
- Don't mention DocBook as its obsolete and too specific.
- Rename derivation attribute name of configuration.nix(5) manual page,
both on the `contributing-to-this-manual.chapter.md`, and in other
places.
Since each such `nixos-*` tool has it's own derivation, exposed in pkgs,
There is no point in separating the manuals from the packages. If
someone wishes to have the tools without the manuals, they can use
meta.outputsToInstall to disable the installation of the manpages of
these packages. This Fixes#244450.
After building the target system, `nixos-install` tries to remove `/mnt`
on the target filesystem. And the script may fail without any explanation,
if `/mnt` isn't empty.
This commit makes the installation process carry on even if there are
files under `/mnt`.
See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/244643.
Although 'lib' isn't needed by the default configuration, new NixOS uses
can get confused when being recommended configuration.nix snippets like
systemd.services.NetworkManager-wait-online.enable = lib.mkForce false;
and have `sudo nixos-rebuild switch` fail with
error: undefined variable 'lib'
swraid support will now only be enabled by default if stateVersion is
older than 23.11. nixos-generate-config will now generate explicit
config for enabling support if needed.
This is copied from isoImage.squashfsCompression. It's useful to be
able to customise, as iteration cycles are very slow with xz, and
subjectively systems booted with less efficiently compressed squashfs
stores appear to have faster reads (although I didn't test that
scientificly so there could be other factors).
The single option tries to do too much work, which just ends up confusing people.
So:
- don't force the console font, the kernel can figure this out as of #210205
- don't force the systemd-boot mode, it's an awkward mode that's not supported
on most things and will break flicker-free boot
- add a separate option for the xorg cursor scaling trick and move it under the xorg namespace
- add a general `fonts.optimizeForVeryHighDPI` option that explicitly says what it does
- alias the old option to that
- don't set any of those automatically in nixos-generate-config
Guest operating systems inside VMs or containers can't update the host CPU's microcode for obvious security reasons, so setting the `hardware.cpu.*.updateMicrocode` options is pointless.
This change adds an option to disable legacy BIOS boot support for ISO
images. The implementation uses syslinux package that currently does not
support non-x86 platforms and thus cannot be cross-compiled, e.g. from
AArch64 system.
adding two graphical programs makes a strong assmuption that users will
use a graphical environment.
add a command line program as an alternative suggestion that is easy to
comment in as a first-steps measure.
This builds on top of nixpkgs mainline 00d8347180
with the following two PRs cherry-picked:
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/192670
- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/192668
using the following command:
```
nix build -f nixos -L \
-I nixos-config=nixos/modules/installer/sd-card/sd-image-powerpc64le.nix \
config.system.build.sdImage
```
I was able to successfully boot the image, although it boots to a login prompt
rather than a shell, and won't accept the empty password for `root`. I guess
I'll have to figure out why that is.
To boot the image: `zstd`-decompress the it, mount it, and use `kexec`:
```
cd boot/nixos
kexec -l \
*-vmlinux \
--initrd *-initrd \
--dt-no-old-root \
--command-line="$(grep APPEND ../extlinux/extlinux.conf | sed 's_^ *APPEND *__')"
```
The machine I used for testing has only one storage device which is completely
allocated to LVM. It appears that the NixOS ISO loader doesn't look for
partition tables within LVM volumes. To work aroundn this, I had to extract the
`ext4` image within the partition table within the `sd-card` image and put that
in its own LVM volume. This likely won't be an obstacle for users who write the
image to a USB stick or similar.
According to the Unicode Standard, you should use U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE
QUOTATION MARK for apostrophes [1]. Before this change, some of the text
in this repo would use U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARKs instead.
[1]: https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/ch06.pdf#G12411
This moves the creation of the bind mount inside the `nixos-enter`
invocation. The command are executed in an unshared mount namespace, so
they can be run as an unprivileged user.
Although we don't really need HTML documentation in the minimal installer,
not including it may cause annoying cache misses in the case of the NixOS manual.
When installing NixOS in the target filesystem /mnt, paths relative to
configuration.nix in `initrd.secrets` are turned by Nix into absolute
paths that reference /mnt. While building the system derivation works,
installing the bootloader fails because the latter process takes place
inside the chroot environment where /mnt does not exist.
Ideally, we would also build the system within chroot, but this greatly
complicates the matter as it requires manually copying over Nix, its
runtime dependencies and all channels. Possibly, this would also break
several assumptions users have about how nixos-install works.
A simpler and safer (but less neat) solution is to temporarily bind
mount all mount points in /mnt under /mnt/mnt to keep the paths
functional while the bootloader is being installed.
This is essentially the workaround described in issue #73404.
Due to missing `/etc/machine-id` in the new root, systemd-tmpfiles
outputs a bunch of scary warnings like "Failed to replace specifiers in
'/run/log/journal/%m'". We only care about /tmp, so hide them.
`-E` is an alias for `--exclude-prefix=/dev --exclude-prefix=/proc
--exclude-prefix=/run --exclude-prefix=/sys`.
Support for ZFS, while desirable, is problematic with newer kernel
releases. The stable ZFS release seldom supports the current newest
kernel version, and this makes the new_kernel image basically useless as
it cannot be published, and is not often built with new kernel releases.
This uses a dirty workaround to work around the fact it is impossible to
remove a list item from a modules system list type. Since ZFS support is
conditional to being supported on the current platform, we can fake ZFS
not being supported *for the no-zfs build only*. This overlay is only
added when evaluating the image, nothing else.
Support for ZFS, while desirable, is problematic with newer kernel
releases. The stable ZFS release seldom supports the current newest
kernel version, and this makes the new_kernel iso basically useless as
it cannot be published, and is not often built with new kernel releases.
This uses a dirty workaround to work around the fact it is impossible to
remove a list item from a modules system list type. Since ZFS support is
conditional to being supported on the current platform, we can fake ZFS
not being supported *for the no-zfs build only*. This overlay is only
added when evaluating the iso, nothing else.
Pin the `nixpkgs` registry entry to the *filtered* nixpkgs source to
avoid copying the entire `.git` directory to the ISO when building
from a local checkout.
Also set `to` directly instead of the `flake.outPath` hack.
This is done for sd-images only here, but should probably also be done
for dvd-images.
The --invariant arg should be a better way of making mkfs.vfat deterministic.
The previous version of invoking faketime was building fine and reproducible
when I was compiling an sdimage for aarch64 under emulation.
It was however still logging errors:
ERROR: ld.so: object '/nix/store/1c2cp2709kmvby8ql2n9946v7l52nn50-libfaketime-0.9.9/lib/libfaketime.so.1' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/nix/store/1c2cp2709kmvby8ql2n9946v7l52nn50-libfaketime-0.9.9/lib/libfaketime.so.1' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
The logged errors were presumably inaccurate somehow as calling
faketime was required for reproducibility, even though the log makes it
looks like it failed.
Within #193485 (and the previous changes) the internal structure of the
testing driver was changed. Since then, `makeTest` returns the
attributes for the VM test(s) (including `driverInteractive`) inside a
sub-attribute called `test`, so without this change running
`nixos-build-vms` would fail like this:
error: attribute 'driverInteractive' missing
Move already implemented functionality to the upper level so
it could be used in a more generic way.
Signed-off-by: Ivan Nikolaenko <ivan.nikolaenko@unikie.com>
this mostly means marking options that use markdown already
appropriately and making a few adjustments so they still render
correctly. notable for nftables we have to transform the md links
because the manpage would not render them correctly otherwise.
