nixwrt VS linux

tl;dr: here are three commercial embedded NixOS uses and a couple of other embedded NixOS projects

1. LumiGuide uses NixOS for their embedded systems, which track automatic bicycle rentals at little solar-powered stations IIRC: https://av.tib.eu/media/39625 (also some coverage here: https://www.worksonarm.com/blog/nixos/ )

2. Yakkertech uses NixOS for their embedded systems, which do baseball pitch tracking: https://av.tib.eu/media/50713

3. Swift Navigation uses NixOS for CI/CD for the embedded systems they use for GPS and navigation: https://blog.swiftnav.com/using-nixos-to-manage-hardware-tes...

I'd only heard of the first two, and discover the third just now.

There are also two downstream distros/related projects that target embedded systems, but idk how much commercial use they've yet seen, if any:

a. https://github.com/telent/nixwrt

b. https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os

You might want to check out https://github.com/telent/nixwrt and https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os as solutions with similar goals. The former is a promising but yet-unfinished way of using Nix to manage a router, while the latter is a similar way of using Nix to generate an immutable OS image.

And, if you take into consideration my personal, subjective opinions on what a distro must be (declarative, fearless to tinker with, mostly binary based but with easy overrides, mostly stateless, easy to roll back in case something goes wrong), then that leaves pretty much two options: NixOS and Guix, and because I don't really like LISP syntax, I go with NixOS as my favourite distro for desktops and servers. For embedded, I've recently tried NixWrt and it seems to work quite well, however I'm still using OpenWRT for "mission-critical" routers.

is it using/based on megi's linux kernel or something else? if so, are there plans to support different kernels in the future (l4 based?)

Here: https://github.com/megous/linux

[alarm@danctnix ~]$ pacman -Qi linux-megi Name : linux-megi Version : 5.17.6-1 Description : The Linux Kernel and modules - Megous Kernel Architecture : aarch64 URL : https://github.com/megous/linux Licenses : GPL2 Groups : None Provides : kernel26 linux=5.17.6 Depends On : coreutils kmod mkinitcpio>=0.7 Optional Deps : crda: to set the correct wireless channels of your country Required By : device-pine64-pinephone Optional For : base Conflicts With : linux Replaces : linux-pine64 Installed Size : 180.53 MiB Packager : DanctNIX Build System [email protected] Build Date : Fri 13 May 2022 07:26:00 PM UTC Install Date : Sun 05 Jun 2022 06:13:14 PM UTC Install Reason : Installed as a dependency for another package Install Script : Yes Validated By : Signature ```

Do you know more details how much the efforts progress regarding mainline support for mobile devices? I've only observed a lot of the discussions over at pmOS (and some at ArchLinuxARM for that matter), but to me it's very unclear what the "workflow" should look like if I would have, say a patch ready for my pinephone.

A lot of efforts seem to be somehow widespread across the interwebz, with varying degrees of stability, and seem to be very uncoordinated or isolated efforts.

I'm asking this, because I've seen that the nix file builds from megous' Linux fork [1] so I'm a bit unsure on how "official" it is in regards to whether or not pull requests/patches submitted there will be integrated upstream.

(Sorry if I misunderstood it, but I'm a bit cautious having developed on dozens of abandoned forks of Linux kernels for Android/AOSP before - as most of them were a waste of development years due to no patron available or willing to merge fixes upstream)

[1] https://github.com/megous/linux