make-disk-image.nix loader for Raspberry Pi

status: unstable

What is it?

A module to make booting your NixOS configuration possible on a Raspberry Pi using make-disk-image.nix

While nix-community/raspberry-pi-nix has wide support for creating images which boot on Raspberry Pis, the approach of using sd-image.nix restricts the ability to test the machine end to end (including bootloader) using qemu-vm.nix, which is what testers.runNixOSTest uses.

Getting started

Prebuilt image

Download the prebuilt image from the latest github releases

CAUTION: the image has SSH enabled with a known username/password.

The prebuilt image has SSH enabled, you can log in with:

username: nixos
password: password

The purpose of this image is to allow you to quickly test whether this module will work for you. It isn't intended to serve as a long lived OS for your board.

Roll your own

# flake.nix
inputs.nixos-hardware.url = "github:NixOS/nixos-hardware/master";
inputs.nix-pi-loader.url  = "github:rcambrj/nix-pi-loader";

# configuration.nix
imports = [
  # select the relevant nixos-hardware module
  # inputs.nixos-hardware.nixosModules.raspberry-pi-3
  # inputs.nixos-hardware.nixosModules.raspberry-pi-4

	inputs.nix-pi-loader.nixosModules.default
];
boot.pi-loader.enable = true;

You cannot use boot.loader.generic-extlinux-compatible. This module disables it because it has its own modified version at boot.loader.generic-extlinux-compatible-pi-loader. You can set options there instead, but please see the upcoming work section for why this might be removed in the future.

Building an image file

# configuration.nix
system.build.image = (import "${toString modulesPath}/../lib/make-disk-image.nix" {
  inherit lib config pkgs;
  format = "raw";
  partitionTableType = "efi";
  touchEFIVars = false;
  installBootLoader = true;
});

Then run

nix build <path-to-flake>#nixosConfigurations.<your-machine-name>.config.system.build.image