NixCon 22 talk resources

Here’s a little collection of links to things I mentioned in my talk (also transcribed into a blog post) at NixCon 2022, roughly categorised.

If any of these links rot, let me know! You can contact me via Matrix at @linus:schreibt.jetzt or the equivalent email address.

General

• nixos-generators, a project that wraps a lot of the functionality I mentioned into a convenient command

netboot

• the NixOS manual section on netboot
• nix-netboot-serve, Determinate Systems’s server which constructs netboot images on-demand for fast iteration times

VM scripts and tests

• the NixOS manual section on VM tests, which explains the concept of NixOS tests and describes the test driver API
• a brief blog post on VM tests written by me and some former colleagues at Mayflower (note that this uses the now removed Perl API; the concepts are transferrable to the new Python driver though).

Beyond NixOS

• NixWRT, Daniel Barlow’s original Nix-based networking device OS
• Liminix, Daniel Barlow’s in-progress rewrite of NixWRT
• uap-nix, the tiny Nix-based OS I constructed for my WiFi access point
• celun, a budding framework for building embedded Linux systems with Nix

switch-root

• my blog post on the switch-root technique which explains the switch-root technique and shows how I used it to install Ubuntu without repartitioning
• my switch-root gist which goes into a little more practical detail on the switch-root technique for NixOS

kexec

• Michael Bishop’s implementation of the kexec technique, which popularised the concept