Roadmap 2015

[emery at ...261...]

Norman,

I think you are right to point to Nix on Noux, and I will make it my next
priority. Even if it were practical to reuse legacy package expressions
from Nixpkgs it would be much easier if there was a mature Noux Nix running
natively rather than going through a lot of cross-compilation and
bootstrapping on a Linux host first.

Getting Nix to compile should be straightforward, but building and storing
outputs will take some consideration and probably a few design
iterations to work well on Genode, though I'm certain it will yield some novel
improvements over POSIX Nix. I don't yet have any concrete ideas on what
changes would be made, but I will know more as I inspect Noux and Nix.

Emery

On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 01:26:11PM +0100, Norman Feske wrote:

> > * Adapt the Nix packages collection to build its existing packages for
> >    Noux. This similar to how packages may be built for Darwin or BSD,
> >   I would abort converting Make rules for anything not required for
> >    bootstrapping a Noux toolchain.
>
> Even though that sounds intriguing at the first glance, I cannot say
> that I regard the porting of Noux packages as a big hurdle right now. So
> far, my attempts to port software packages that use the GNU build system
> went actually fairly smooth. Personally, I am not so much interested in
> a big volume of packages. In my day to day work, only a few packages are
> actually used (the most significant gap in this respect is a proper
> LaTeX environment). While porting software to Noux, the most prominent
> stumbling blocks use to be functionalities missing from our C runtime
> (e.g., if a program relies on Unix signals), performance bottlenecks, or
> limitations of our terminal (e.g., lack of support for ANSI pseudo
> graphics). None of those issues will go away with the switch of Noux
> packages to Nix.
>
> > * Work towards running virtualizing instances of NixOS, building the Genode
> >    host and the NixOS guest concurrently.
> >
> >
> > I have had success related to virtualizing, I have managed to integrate my
> > build expressions with the NixOS system expression on my host machine,
> > installing a NOVA scenario to my boot partition and GRUB menu. One could
> > obviously do this with a set of scripts calling make, but in this way the
> > Genode components are treated as system dependencies just as my linux host
> > would treat its system services.
> >
> > I think the next logical step in this line of thought would be to build my
> > Linux host system as an image optimized for Seoul, but I am traveling at
> > the moment and virtualizing Seoul scenarios has been slow going with only a
> > single laptop.
>
> That looks interesting and very much in line with the plans I laid out
> in my initial posting. But you approach the idea from a different angle.
> I am curious where this development is heading.
>
> As another idea, have you considered to port Nix to Noux? That would
> further blur the line between NixOS and Genode.
>
> Cheers
> Norman
>
>
> --
> Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
> Genode Labs
>
> http://www.genode-labs.com · http://genode.org
>
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