PXE Booting NixOS

Nahum Shalman

Apr 21, 2016 • 1 min read

I've been outed on Twitter:

Thanks to some awesome work from @nahumshalman, we'll soon have a PXE bootable #NixOS installer! https://t.co/WHHwP1Bm5i
— Charles Strahan (@charlesstrahan) April 21, 2016

I've been working on this pull request for the past couple of weeks as I've been exploring the possibility of using NixOS as a new substrate for building Cerana. If those experiments pan out we'll be switching over from our old build system to a new one based around using Nix/NixOS.

If you haven't heard of Nix or NixOS, I highly recommend taking a look at it (I recommend at least glancing at the introduction to Nix from the Nix manual.)

For the SmartOS fans among my readers, there are a couple of Nix related images available from datasets.at (click here and type in "nixos" to find them.)

And for the Docker fans, I found this article about Cheap Docker Images with Nix interesting as well.