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@nzbr@chaos.social

2026-01-28 17:14 UTC

Just uploaded my bachelor's thesis to GitHub! In it, I detail how I created a bootstrap chain for @nixos_org@chaos.social which builds the whole system from a small hand-auditable binary seed. Read the thesis: https://nzbr.github.io/nixos-full-source-bootstrap/thesis.pdf Check out the code: https://github.com/nzbr/nixos-full-source-bootstrap My post on the NixOS discourse: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-full-source-bootstrap-for-nixos/74801

Replies (5)

  • @Atemu@darmstadt.social 2026-01-28 18:18

    @nixos_org @nzbr I read this expectating to find a demonstration of applying the previous work of #GUIX to #nix but this actually goes further! o.o TIL about #live_bootstrap, a minimal binary seed that you can *boot on physical hardware*, *builds a linux distribution from source* and then boots into it. https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap I did not know that this part of the chain had a working solution! Amazing work on integrating Nix into all of that!

    Open ##1429670

  • @Atemu@darmstadt.social 2026-01-28 18:39

    @nixos_org @nzbr While we're on the topic: work on minimal-bootstrap in #nixpkgs has actually been picked up again since this thesis was written (October 2025). Not only that but, as of a few hours ago, the PR implementing the last step of hooking it up to become the actual bootstrap stdenv in Nixpkgs has been merged! https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/479322 #fullsourcebootstrap #reproduciblebuilds #stage0 #minimalbootstrap #bootstrappablebuilds

    Open ##1429674

  • @korkeala@hachyderm.io 2026-01-29 09:33

    @nzbr @nixos_org Congrats, nice work!

    Open ##1429678

  • @KarlPettersson@mastodon.nu 2026-01-29 19:13

    @nzbr @nixos_org Nice! If someone wants to try live-bootstrap with QEMU/bare images generated on a ZFS dataset (and possibly other CoW filesystems), there is a bug in the Python generator scripts which leads to corrupt images. I made a simple fix, which hopefully will be merged. https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/pull/567

    Open ##1429681

  • @nixos_org @nzbr seems really interesting! Looking forward reading it asap

    Open ##1429682