Btw, I'm caring on the port to the Sheevaplug (arm + u-boot). Many things already work from nixpkgs stdenvLinux, but I still can't recreate bootstrapfiles (dietlibc doesn't work in arm-eabi, I may try with glibc there). I don't work intensively at all on that, but I don't use the Sheevaplug for any other task, and I don't plan to, until I get a minimum NixOS there working.
I plan to write u-boot related code in nixos in order to manage the boot of previous configurations. I don't think it will be very difficult. u-boot doesn't show any menu easily, but can be stopped from auto-boot on timeout, and then having set some easy-to-find u-boot ready scripts for each system generation, an experienced user should be able to easily boot an old config. Regards, Lluís. 2008/10/15 Daniel Clark <[email protected]>: > I'm in the process of seeing how hard it would be to port NixOS to > non-intel architectures / boot loaders other than grub. Specifically > I'm working with a Loongson 2f machine, which is a mipsel64 (64-bit > MIPS little-endian) machine that uses the PMON 2000 boot loader. > > At the moment I'm just starting to play with the build tools - I have > nix built, and am working on compiling nixpkgs. Before I start down a > path of naive stupidity, I thought I'd ping the list and see if anyone > more familiar with the project had given thought on an architecture > that would allow NixOS to revert to previous configurations as part of > the normal boot process, instead of via a boot loader (even if PMON > 2000 could be made to work like grub does, I think it would be too > annoying to have to redo that integration with every random boot > loader out there - there are more than you would think). > > I'd also like to know if there is any interest amongst the NixOS > developers to make NixOS a distribution that would be compliant with > the FSF/GNU Project's Guidelines for Free System Distributions [1] and > thus recommendable by the Free Software Foundation, and if not if > there would be any major objections to someone creating a NixOS > variant that would be (as far as I can tell the Nix package management > system would make such a fork much less disruptive and able to give > back to core NixOS than other package management systems). > > Specifically I'm looking for an operating system that is a better > candidate for the port described above than gNewSense. The technical > problem of the gNewSense GNU/Linux / Debian build infrastructure being > significantly less pretty than Nix is in theory fixable [2,3], but the > political problem of gNewSense being based on Ubuntu, and > Ubuntu/Canonical having little interest in creating and maintaining > ports to less-mainstream architectures seems less surmountable. > > I also think that Nix is just better suited than Debian for a > operating system for people who really, really care about using only > Free Software (think rms), as it looks like it is provable that a > piece of software is derived only from other pieces of free software, > and also possible to easily audit a distribution to make sure binaries > that are not actually derivable from available free software sources > are not included. > > BTW I added the 3 nix-related projects that weren't in ohloh to ohloh > [4]; I forget which 3 they were, but in general core nix developers > might want to go and take management ownership of the projects. > > [1] FSF/GNU Project Guidelines for Free System Distributions > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html > > [2] ohloh: gNewSense Builder > http://www.ohloh.net/projects/gnewsense-builder > > [3] gNewSense Official Website: Builder / Builder > http://www.gnewsense.org/index.php?n=Builder.Builder > > [4] ohloh: Search Projects: nix > http://www.ohloh.net/projects/search?q=nix > > Cheers, > -- > Daniel JB Clark # http://opensysadmin.com > _______________________________________________ > nix-dev mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.cs.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev > _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.cs.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
