nixos.fi

Another option is to run it ephemerally from the RAM. I have been doing this for my laptop and servers for years now. You can do so by declaring the following: https://github.com/ponkila/HomestakerOS/blob/main/nixosModul... You need to then have a flake which defines a "package" like this: https://github.com/jhvst/nix-config/blob/main/flake.nix#L117... Now you can run 'nix build .#starlabs' which will create you the files needed for kexec / PXE booting. You can also write tests that these images actually boot ok: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixostest-with-flake-configura... I started working on this stuff because I needed to somehow reliably update my homeserver. I live abroad 50 weeks a year, so I needed something reliable because I can't assume I have physical access to the computer. Even when the BMC firmware got screwed by ASRock m

https://github.com/majbacka-labs/nixos.fi https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40010991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39720007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39692801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39658684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39004785 I didn’t find these via HN search, I found them in my bookmarking account. I have a slightly strange way of bookmarking - I send emails to a dedicated email account, so these I found there looking for Nix in a search.

Just the other week I used Nix on my laptop to derive PXE boot images, uploaded those to IPFS, and netbooted my server in another country over a public IPFS mirror. The initrd gets mounted as read-only overlayfs on boot. My configs are public: https://github.com/jhvst/nix-config I plan to write documentation of the IPFS process including the PXE router config later at https://github.com/majbacka-labs/nixos.fi -- we might also run a small public build server for peoples Flake configs, who are interested in trying out this process.

Nix-based PXE booting. It can boot different images than your NixOS-based system configurations, but the main focus has been to support NixOS. We even have a system which is able to scan your hardware pre-boot, and then launch the initial ramdisk with a kernel which has all the required drivers pre-installed. https://github.com/majbacka-labs/nixos.fi