This is a 277K (as of right now) addition that can greatly help in some
last recourse scenarios. The specific rEFInd setup will not be able to
boot the installer image, but this is not why it has been added. It has
been added to make use of its volumes scanning capabilities to boot
existing EFI images on the target computer, which is sometimes necessary
with buggy EFI. While is isn't NixOS's job to fix buggy EFI, shipping
this small bit with the installer will help the unlucky few.
Example scenario: two wildly different EFI implementation I have
encountered have fatal flaws in which they sometimes will lose all the
settings, this includes boot configuration. This is compounded by the
fact that the two specific and distinct implementation do not allow
manually adding ESP paths from their interface. The only recourse is to
let the EFI boot the default paths, EFI/boot/boot{platform}.efi, which
is not a default location used by the NixOS bootloaders. rEFInd is able
to scan the volumes and detect the existing efi bootloaders, and boot
them successfully.
Following up https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/23665
Bootable USB-drives are not limited to ISO-images, there can be "normal" MBR/GPT-partitioned disk connected via USB-rack.
Also, "uas" implies "usb-storage", so there is no need to mention both.
This reverts commit 095fe5b43def40279a243e663c662b02caac5318.
Pointless renames considered harmful. All they do is force people to
spend extra work updating their configs for no benefit, and hindering
the ability to switch between unstable and stable versions of NixOS.
Like, what was the value of having the "nixos." there? I mean, by
definition anything in a NixOS module has something to do with NixOS...
Nothing probably uses this, but let's be pedantic and have the
pre-included channel on the install media be as close as possible to
what 'nix-channel --update' will give them.
The only remaining difference is that the channel adds programs.sqlite,
which is fundamentally unfixable.
- Add `imageName` and `imageBaseName` options similar to the `isoName`
and `isoBaseName` options
- Make the filename of the iso match what iso-image.nix does
- Generate a nix-support/hydra-build-products like iso-image.nix does
Add another option for debugging instead. Lots of users have been
complaining about this default behaviour.
This patch also cleans up the EFI bootloader entries in the ISO.
This version should have more conventional regexes that work across many
platforms and regex engines. This is an issue because up until Nix 1.11,
Nix called out to the libc regex matcher, which behaved differently on
Darwin and Linux. And in Nix 1.12, we're moving to std::regex which will
also behave differently here.
And yes, I do actually evaluate make-disk-image.nix on Darwin ;)
Currently, if you try to build a NixOS config including channel.nix, e.g.:
nix-build -I nixpkgs=. -I nixos-config=nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd/installation-cd-minimal.nix nixos -A config.system.build.isoImage
twice in a row, you end up with two different build results. This is
caused by the 'result' symlink of the first build affecting the channel
contents of the second build.
If we use filterSource with a predicate that ignores the 'result'
symlinks, the problem is gone. Do the same thing for VIM/Emacs
swap/backup files to avoid even more 'spurious' rebuilds.
Additionally, filter out the '.git' directory at the same time, as we
'rm -rf' it from the result anyway. This avoids a considerable amount of
unnecessary file I/O copying and deleting the .git directory.
Turns out all variants of start.elf and fixup.dat are needed (depending
on what's in config.txt). I was under the mistaken impression that you
were supposed to rename one of the variants to switch using them, but
nope.
