Nixos-install on VirtualBox produces no output at all, but is using CPU for hours

Help
1

So I wanted to first try NixOS on Virtualbox before installing it on my machine. The machine setup I wanted to have is zfs with mirroring and encryption (I followed this article Encrypted ZFS mirror with mirrored boot on NixOS).

When setting everything up - namely, disk partitioning and other things mentioned in the article above) - everything went fine. However, on the last step, when I run nixos-install - it just sort of freezes. The CPU keeps doing something for hours (I waited 2,5 hours), I can see that - but literally NO OUTPUT is being produced. I tried running nixos-install -v -L for verbose output - but there’s still nothing. There are no errors or anything that would hint at misconfiguration.

Does anyone have any idea how to diagnose this?

2

Maybe it is caused because the virtual machine doesn’t have enought RAM (as evaluation of nixpkgs take approx 1-2GiB of ram on my machine). The VM may be trying to use swap, and swap is really slow.

3

what does

 nixos-install -vvvvv

give you?

also you can always monitor what nixos-install is doing from another shell.

if you have enabled a swap device, and can see it with

swapon 
NAME      TYPE       SIZE   USED  PRIO
/dev/sdc2 partition   14.9G 55.8M   -2

and it’s being used, then add more ram :-).