Software to allow partitioning gpu resources among multiple virtual machines instead of just assigning the one PCIe device to a single VM. Very useful for having a single GPU do 3D acceleration on a host and multiple guests at the same time.
Your personal files e.g. ~/Documents are not recreated, you’ll still need backups of those.
caveats are you’ve got to use:
But all this can be written in the one flake, so yes nixos-install --flake <GIT URL>#<HOSTNAME>
Is sufficient for me to rebuild my desktop, laptop or server from the same repository.
I’ve never used Gentoo, and I’m sure there are other methods of achieving the same level of reproducibility but I don’t know what they are.
Nixos can be as modifiable as Gentoo with the caveat being it’s a massive pain in the ass to do some things. I have a flake for making aarch64-musl systems which has been an endeavour, and… It works? I have a running system that works on 2 different SoCs. I do have to compile everything quite often though.
There are efforts to recreate Nixos without systemd, but that’s a huge effort; because it’s very “infrastructure as code”, you have to change a lot of code where editing a build script would’ve sufficed on arch/Gentoo.
As for nix vs guix, guix was described to me as “if you only ever want to write in scheme”, whereas nix feels much more like a means to an end with practical compromises spattered throughout.
Perhaps, but when I accidentally nuked my system by dd’ing to one of the hard drives, being able to install the exact same system back onto it by pointing the installer to my git repository was an excellent experience.
Statically linking is absolutely a tool we should use far more often, and one we should get better at supporting.
I wish.
It was a bcachefs array with data replicas being a mix of 1,2 & 4 depending on what was most important, but thankfully I had the foresight to set metadata to be mirrored for all 4 drives.
I didn’t get the good fortune of only having to do a resilver, but all I really had to do was fsck to remove references to non-existent nodes until the system would mount read-only, then back it up and rebuild it.
NixOS did save my bacon re: being able to get back to work on the same system by morning.
A few months ago I accidentally dd’d ~3GiB to the beginning of one of the drives in a 4 drive array… That was fun to rebuild.
I remember old Tesla and Firepro drivers had a jank, proprietary alternative to SR-IOV but didn’t think any vendor (except Intel with i915’s GVT-g) had an implementation for their consumer devices.