NixOS on ARM/Raspberry Pi 5: Difference between revisions

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The Raspberry Pi family of devices is a series of single-board computers made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. They are all based on Broadcom System-on-a-chip (SoCs).

== Status ==

== Current Status ==

NixOS is not officially supported on the Raspberry Pi 5, and the community efforts to bring the operating system to the development board have been less successful than the ones targeting the previous generation, the [[NixOS on ARM/Raspberry Pi 4|Raspberry Pi 4]]. It is advisable, for the time being, that all critical projects continue using and deploying the older model, for which the support is significantly more robust.

'''~~NixOS works on~~ Raspberry Pi 5 ~~but~~ is ~~currently experimental'''~~.

For the adventurous, there are multiple community efforts enabling NixOS on the board, with various degrees of user friendliness, support availability or robustness, some of which can be found in the ''Other solutions'' section below. Amongst them, the community has flagged one repository that seems to have achieved a reasonable trade-off between all the necessary requirements for such a project; this is described in the ''Current Proposed Solution'' section below. While by no means official, and its level of support still under development, it is a good enough starting ground for people wanting to take advantage of their Raspberry Pi 5.

NixOS doesn't run out-of-box, but relies on several tweaks on the boot process that are maintained by different individuals and spread over multiple repositories.

However, this solution reuses proprietary software distributed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation; which is highly criticized by the NixOS community, and the Linux community at large, for reasons including reproducibility, transparency, security, predictibility, etc. There are efforts in the community to address these issues as well, and the following sub-section is an overview into these efforts.

=== Generic UEFI boot support ===

NixOS doesn't run out-of-box, but relies on several tweaks on the boot process that are maintained by different individuals and spread over multiple repositories. The Raspberry Pi 5's boot process follows the [https://youtu.be/UvFG76qM6co?t=308 typical boot stages on embedded devices], and has the following boot loader steps by default:

~~The Raspberry Pi 5's boot process follows the [https://youtu.be/UvFG76qM6co?t=308 typical boot stages on embedded devices], and has the following boot loader steps by default:~~

1. ROM -> 2. EEPROM -> Pi-custom Firmware/Kernel -> PiOS (custom Debian)

'''The pain points for NixOS support''' are the Pi's [https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom custom EEPROM boot bootloader], its [https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware proprietary, closed-source firmware] (code to use to hardware components) and [https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux its separately maintained Linux kernel], all of which we would need to '''update, build and test constantly and separately''' from the other NixOS Linux kernel variations, '''which is a large, unmaintainable burden for the NixOS community''' when the Pi 5 is not the only supported SoC; so we don't want that.

@@ Line 29: / Line 29: @@
 The Raspberry Pi family of devices is a series of single-board computers made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. They are all based on Broadcom System-on-a-chip (SoCs).
-== Status ==
+== Current Status ==
+NixOS is not officially supported on the Raspberry Pi 5, and the community efforts to bring the operating system to the development board have been less successful than the ones targeting the previous generation, the [[NixOS on ARM/Raspberry Pi 4|Raspberry Pi 4]]. It is advisable, for the time being, that all critical projects continue using and deploying the older model, for which the support is significantly more robust.
-'''NixOS works on Raspberry Pi 5 but is currently experimental'''.
+For the adventurous, there are multiple community efforts enabling NixOS on the board, with various degrees of user friendliness, support availability or robustness, some of which can be found in the ''Other solutions'' section below. Amongst them, the community has flagged one repository that seems to have achieved a reasonable trade-off between all the necessary requirements for such a project; this is described in the ''Current Proposed Solution'' section below. While by no means official, and its level of support still under development, it is a good enough starting ground for people wanting to take advantage of their Raspberry Pi 5.
-NixOS doesn't run out-of-box, but relies on several tweaks on the boot process that are maintained by different individuals and spread over multiple repositories.
+However, this solution reuses proprietary software distributed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation; which is highly criticized by the NixOS community, and the Linux community at large, for reasons including reproducibility, transparency, security, predictibility, etc. There are efforts in the community to address these issues as well, and the following sub-section is an overview into these efforts.
+=== Generic UEFI boot support ===
+NixOS doesn't run out-of-box, but relies on several tweaks on the boot process that are maintained by different individuals and spread over multiple repositories. The Raspberry Pi 5's boot process follows the [https://youtu.be/UvFG76qM6co?t=308 typical boot stages on embedded devices], and has the following boot loader steps by default:
+<!-- I'm including here the Mermaid code to generate this diagram. It would be amazing if we could do -->
+<!-- this via a template, but until then, here it is:                                                 -->
+<!-- flowchart LR                           -->
+<!--     ROM -\-> EEPROM                    -->
+<!--     EEPROM -\-> FK[Firmware / Kernel]  -->
+<!--     FK -\-> OS[Raspberry Pi OS]        -->
-The Raspberry Pi 5's boot process follows the [https://youtu.be/UvFG76qM6co?t=308 typical boot stages on embedded devices], and has the following boot loader steps by default:
 . ROM -> 2. EEPROM -> Pi-custom Firmware/Kernel -> PiOS (custom Debian)
 '''The pain points for NixOS support''' are the Pi's [https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom custom EEPROM boot bootloader], its  [https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware proprietary, closed-source firmware] (code to use to hardware components) and [https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux its separately maintained Linux kernel], all of which we would need to '''update, build and test constantly and separately''' from the other NixOS Linux kernel variations, '''which is a large, unmaintainable burden for the NixOS community''' when the Pi 5 is not the only supported SoC; so we don't want that.