How to install a flake onto a Raspberry Pi?

Help
1

I’m some problems with install my flakes on a raspi.
Usually I boot from the live image, execute my nix-shell to enable flakes then install the config with nixos-install —flake .#hostname —impure.
This however gives me an error that the flake.nix escapes from the store path (whatever that means).
Since the OS is already on the SD I thought that I might have to enable Flakes in the configuration.nix but this file doesn’t exist and when I symlink my flake to /etc/nixos/flake.nix and do a rebuild it complains about the experimental flag being unknown.

I added now a basic configuration.nix and enabled flakes in that but this doesn’t feel like it is the proper way to do it.
In the future I plan to create a custom image but I would like to know this way as well.

2

Nobody tried Flakes on a Raspi?

3

Despite being PI or not, installing a base configuration with activated flakes using “legacy” configuration and then switching to an actual flake based config after the first boot has been the most reliable way to install from flake.

nixos-install --flake always has its problems with this or that…

4

I use flakes on a Raspberry Pi 4B+. I install with a GitHub URL rather than a local flake (using nixos-install). I also use the aarch64 ISO instead of the SD image. You can see my config here. The Raspberry Pi host is khloe.

5

I hadn’t any problems with the normal ISOs and a nix-shell on x86 systems that’s why I was wondering.
Since the Pi doesn’t come with a base configuration.nix you have to create that as well instead of just enabling Flakes.
Granted not a huge task if you’ve done once but still a bit unnecessary.

6

Very interesting, can you describe your steps to install it in a bit more detail?
I tried the aarch64 ISO in combination with tow-boot and the PTF firmware but wasn’t able to get it to boot.
I always got this error after the generations screen:

mmc0: error -5 whilst initialising sd card

Why do you have the imports the way they are and don’t use the config from nixos-hardware?
What does reset_raspberrypi do and why do you mount /boot/efi and not just /boot?
Edit: I’ve since found out that you specifically point to /boot/efi can you explain why though?

7

Sure. I’m using the PFT firmware firmware and running my Pi off an SSD. Before I did the installation, I went into the firmware and disabled the 3GB limit and set it to devicetree (for CPU governor support). I put the aarch64 ISO image on a USB stick and the firmware on a FAT-formatted SD card.

For the installation itself, I booted off the USB stick and created the partitions on the SSD. The EEPROM is new enough to support USB booting, so I created the partitions using sgdisk (the funky order is just because I didn’t want the EPS as partition 1 for some reason at the time):

DISK=<target disk>    
sgdisk -Z $DISK -n 3:2048:+384M -n 2:0:+2048M -n 1:0:0 -t 3:ef00 -t 2:8200 -t 1:8300
mkfs -t vfat -F 32 -n ESP $DISK-part3
mkfs -t xfs -L NixOS $DISK-part1
mkswap -L Swap $DISK-part2 && swapon $DISK-part2

I mounted $DISK-part1 at /mnt and $DISK-part3 at /boot/efi then ran nixos-generate-config --root /mnt to get a hardware-configuration.nix for the installation.

I can’t remember why exactly I mounted the ESP at /boot/efi instead of at /boot. I think I was trying to avoid having the kernels copied to it, but that failed, and I just never bothered to change it. I don’t think it’s necessary.

Anyway, once I had a hardware-configuration.nix, I updated my flake, deleted /mnt/etc, and ran nixos-install --impure --no-root-passwd --flake github:reckenrode:NixOS/nixos-configs/#khloe. The --impure is due to this issue in Home Manager. Once it finished, I systemctl reboot into my new installation.

It took a few iterations to arrive at a working configuration. I learned the hard way that systemd-boot doesn’t work for some reason, and disabling ACPI also resulted in a lot of unnecessary pain. Now that it’s working though, I can just reuse the config if I need to reinstall or set up a new one.

At the time, nixos-generate-config wasn’t including all the modules I needed to boot with devicetree and no ACPI. I tried to figure out which ones, but I eventually gave up and just included all of them. I manually included reset_raspberrypi because it wasn’t part of all-hardware.nix at the time. It’s needed to boot the Pi successfully.

I ran into something similar with my SSD. The config that was generated didn’t include all the modules I needed. That’s why (as noted above) I added all-hardware.nix to my imports in hardware-configuration.nix (because it was easier than trying to find the specific ones I needed).

8

Pew got it working yesterday but took a lot of trial and error.
Turned out that the nixos-hardware import wasn’t compatible with the UEFI installation.
However I still had massive problems and every rebuild after the initial generation resulted in a broken boot.
I tried as well to figure out which kernel modules are really required but as mentioned the boot always failed regardless of the change.
In addition booting took ages compared to the normal image, it just hanged for a long time at the GRUB screen after selecting the generation.
This was with a SD card only setup.
Tow-boot and PFT both gave me the same result.
This message came up as well:

IMG_20220322_210511-1741
IMG_20220322_210511-17411920×887 59.6 KB

I’m going to stick with the normal image for he moment since that works without a problem so far.