| 4 Mar 2025 |
raitobezarius | wrt to EFI drivers | 14:18:38 |
raitobezarius | and it's still pid1 doing the work | 14:18:43 |
raitobezarius | it's a lot of diff because UEFI and strings lol | 14:18:55 |
emily | ah, so you still have to get a kernel | 14:18:55 |
raitobezarius | yep | 14:18:59 |
raitobezarius | but the kernel can come from an URL as long as you have the right EFI driver | 14:19:10 |
emily | that sort of makes it not as interesting to me I guess – avoiding downloading the entire system on every boot was part of why I was curious about using Nix for this | 14:19:35 |
emily | cool all the same though | 14:19:51 |
raitobezarius | we are back to kindof a specialized bootloader like iPXE | 14:20:32 |
emily | yeah | 14:22:01 |
Arian | anyhow back to the topic. should we mount the initramf’s /nix/store as read-only? (either before starting pid1 or by patching pid1) | 14:22:11 |
emily | I just thought it would be cool to be able to push full NixOS systems out and have them cached to disk "just in time" | 14:22:25 |
emily | it seems good/harmless to do so if it's not too invasive | 14:23:08 |
Nick Cao | Create a fuse based nixfs! | 14:23:18 |
emily | though there's no potential for persistent changes anyway right, since it's just the store from the initramfs? | 14:23:19 |
Nick Cao | I always wanted a thing that: what if we store store paths as compressed nars on the disk, and only use fuse to create an illusion of a nix store | 14:24:08 |
emily | that's what Tvix is doing, afaik | 14:24:23 |
emily | though I think FUSE performance kind of sucks, so you probably need to put something in the kernel at some point | 14:24:39 |
Arian | I have usecases where I dont actually have a stage-2 and just bring the app up in initrd. In that case it’s definitely useful I think | 14:24:45 |
emily | don't quote me on that though | 14:24:47 |
emily | conversely maybe we'd want an escape hatch for people wild enough to actually want to run a daemon in stage 1? but those people also probably know what they're doing enough to make it work for themselves anyway. | 14:25:34 |
emily | anyway it seems like a good idea. would be nice to avoid patching systemd for it though. | 14:25:54 |
Arian | just s|/usr|/nix/store| through the entire codebase | 14:26:14 |
Arian | :D | 14:26:20 |
emily | we could just move the store into /usr. | 14:26:32 |
emily | I bet that would make Poettering happy. | 14:26:41 |
Arian | yeh but we’ll have to move /nix/var to /var then | 14:26:44 |
Arian | Honestly how much breaks when we’d set NIX_STORE=/usr/store ? | 14:27:01 |
Nick Cao | /usr/store | 14:27:04 |
Arian | did anyone ever try?? | 14:27:06 |