Quickemu complaining about no EFI firmware

[vcunat]

Looks like an issue in my not using or understanding home manager. The above would be fine with NixOS config.

[TLATER]

As someone who does use home-manager, this is weird.

@noblman, can you try

let
  unstable = (pkgs.lib.debug.traceVal (import <nixos-unstable>)) { config = { allowUnfree = true; }; };
in {
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    unstable.quickemu
  ];
}

[TLATER]

@FedX-sudo

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

let
  unstable = import <nixpkgs-unstable> { };
in {
  home.packages = with pkgs; [
    ]
    ++ (with unstable;
    quickemu
    ]);
}

The issue with this is a missing opening bracket after the with unstable;, by the way. A much better way of doing the above would simply be (since we’re only using one package, and it’s in unstable):

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

let
  unstable = import <nixpkgs-unstable> { };
in {
  home.packages = with unstable; [
    quickemu
  ];
}

But the suggestion is a bit pointless in the first place, the error is clearly complaining about calling <nixpkgs-unstable>'s default.nix, which wouldn’t be happening if quickemu wasn’t being pulled from the unstable variable there.

with is indeed a known anti-pattern that can cause scoping issues, but it’s pretty ok to use as long as you stick to only with pkgs for home.packages-like things and don’t have any name collisions. Scoping isn’t the problem here, and with counter-intuitively doesn’t override variables from the existing scope anyway, so there’s no way this is broken.

[noblman]

@TLATER

As someone who does use home-manager, this is weird.

@noblman, can you try

let
  unstable = (pkgs.lib.debug.traceVal (import <nixos-unstable>)) { config = { allowUnfree = true; }; };
in {
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    unstable.quickemu
  ];
}

First, although you mentioned home-manager, I assume this is supposed to go into configuration.nix since it is using environment.systemPackages.

I tried doing that, and got the following:

❯ sudo nixos-rebuild switch
error: attempt to call something which is not a function but a set, at /etc/nixos/configuration.nix:5:4
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)
building Nix...

[TLATER]

That’s… Odd. It’s not tracing the value. That means it’s failing before it resolves the call to unstable, I think, since type errors like this happen during evaluation so traceVal should have already triggered?

Could you try the following two commands in nix repl:

unstable = import <nixos-unstable> { config = { allowUnfree = true; }; }
unstable.quickemu

I’d like to figure out whether the issue is with the quickemu derivation (?), your configuration of nixos-unstable (??) or something more fundamental about your installation (???). It’d be nice to know where exactly the error comes from.

Given the previous test I assume these will work, and I’ll be very confused. Have you changed what the module system passes around as pkgs somehow? How are you building a system with just those lines in configuration.nix anyway - just to test or are you expecting to switch to that config?

[noblman]

It looks like that worked.

❯ nix repl
Welcome to Nix version 2.3.16. Type :? for help.

nix-repl> unstable = import <nixos-unstable> { config = { allowUnfree = true; }; }

nix-repl> unstable.quickemu
«derivation /nix/store/ispwh8mjksbp5hzrj5cxzzbdj120z319-quickemu-3.14.drv»

nix-repl>

Edit: But now what? I still would like to install the unstable version of quickemu using home-manager.

[noblman]

@FedX-sudo

Hi, I am the maintainer of Quickemu in Nixpkgs, and yes, there has been a fix for that bug since 3.11. I recently bumped it to 3.14 as well.

Hi. I finally figured out how to install unstable quickemu 3.15 in my configuration.nix. Not ideal, because I wanted to do it in home.nix, but that’s OK for now.

Finally I can get back to the original problem, which is that quickemu complains that no SecureBoot firmware is found. I thought that this was something that was fixed in later versions? I also tried adding the package OVMF and OVMFFull, but still no go.

How can I get this working?

[FedX-sudo]

Ah, I am glad you got that working! Would you mind posting the code so future users can better understand what is going on?

As far as SecureBoot, I was unable to get Windows11 working, but Windows10 is pretty solid. Here is what I did for that:

{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
  nixpkgs = {
    overlays = [
      (final: prev: {
        quickemu = prev.quickemu.override { OVMF = pkgs.OVMFFull.override { secureBoot = true; tpmSupport = true; csmSupport = true; httpSupport = true;}; };
      })
    ];
  };
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    quickemu
  ];
}

I needed to override OVMF to allow for SecureBoot, and passed that override into an override of Quickemu.