Recent posts
TL;DR: introducing nar-klepto , the context that led to its inception, and some fun experiments we did last week with it. 4 years ago, I moved out of Bayonne to a rural area. My quality of life almost instantly skyrocketed; however, I quickly felt a bit frustrated that I could only discuss computer-related things via online video meetings. After the 2024 FOSDEM, I realized that if there’s no…
Last year, flokli and I worked towards re-using TwoSigma’s Nsncd as the main NixOS Nscd daemon. What is that even about? Well, Nscd is a Glibc daemon that was originally meant to cache the host/user resolution requests. It’s mostly obsolete by now, but on NixOS and Guix, we abuse this daemon to get a stable ABI to load the host NSS modules from a potentially different glibc version. If…
In this article, we’re about to dive into the uncharted OpenGL on Linux waters. After briefly explaining how the OpenGL calls are routed from your application to the GPU, we’ll look at the NixOS special case. We’ll then explore how we can run the OpenGL programs built by Nix on a foreign distribution, such as Ubuntu or Fedora. Finally, we’ll introduce NixGLHost a new approach to solve…
Abstract Nix and Guix have the unfortunate reputation to require a lot of bandwidth to distribute software. This reputation is sadly grounded. It seems like explicitly pointing to your dependencies comes with an overhead cost in terms of download size. Or does it? Currently, both Guix and Nix can substitute pre-built store paths from a binary cache using the Nix Archive (NAR) format. After…