What happened to raspberry-pi-nix?

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I just got a Raspberry Pi and was looking forward to flashing my SD with NixOS via nix-community/raspberry-pi-nix, but apparently it just got archived last week?

I couldn’t see any information on the repository on why it’s archived; is it no longer recommended, and is there any alternative?

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probably was archived in favour of NixOS Hardware’s implementation of RPI support.

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Hmm, I also ran into this after not finding issues or PRs related to the archiving of raspberry-pi-nix. It’s unfortunate there is no information on why it was archived, nor whether there is a good alternative. @tstat seems to be the main contributor. Maybe he has more info?

I used it to build sdcard image in addition to setting up rpi’s config.txt, like enabling BOOT_UART and disable-wifi. It’s not really clear from nixos-hardware how to set things up the same way. It seems both of these features aren’t supported out of the box.

NixOS on ARM/Raspberry Pi 5 - NixOS Wiki mentions:

I guess this issue is quite relevant to track: Raspberry Pi 5 support · Issue #260754 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

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btw I have this at least building with newer stuff here, but I haven’t even gotten around to trying it yet so good luck :stuck_out_tongue:

More patches are still needed. Some have been posted here (mailing list), but they were based on some other fork of u-boot and I haven’t been able to rebase them to something recent myself.

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Official support is nice!

It would be nice if somebody left a message/update on the GitHub - nix-community/raspberry-pi-nix: NixOS modules to aid in configuring NixOS for raspberry pi products README.md file so we don’t get confused.

I also got confused until I found this. Though I am sure this is better than what I thought \o/

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Unless i’m missing something nixos-hardware does not provide even half the things raspberry-pi-nix does? E.g. config.txt management is a big one.

The reason i started using it was because i could not get a patched mcp251xfd overlay (among a few others, but that was the big one) to work with nixos/nixos-hardware’s device tree support. While the same overlays once compiled worked nicely with the vanilla raspbian approach which also happens to be raspberry-pi-nix’s approach. We use a custom CM4 board at work so some overlays needed to be patched from the upstream ones to add support for more busses than the original overlay was written for (though I do plan to upstream these changes once i have some free minutes).

I don’t take the work of foss devs for granted, if the sole maintainer doesn’t want to work on it anymore i respect that fully and i thank them for their work.
I would wish though that when it’s part of the nix-community umbrella adding an explanation to the readme why it was archived instead of just silently doing so could be a nice habit in the future, because now it just leaves users guessing and looking for alternatives - as is evidenced by this thread.

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I just discovered this and I’m rather concerned, as I have a raspberry pi that has been using this project for a while now, and I’m not sure what to do going forward if the project is archived as there’s no migration path to anything else.

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I think this is the most up to date config: Raspberry Pi 5 support · Issue #260754 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

Never used raspberry-pi-nix but you can probably compare and adjust your current nix configuration.

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That very example you linked uses raspberry-pi-nix :slight_smile:

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Ahah I should definitely read what I copy/paste :sweat_smile:

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I can relate so much! Excactly!

I am holding back on updating the flake lock just because of this: I tried but the project (raspberry-pi-nix) has been archived before nixos-hardware could even implement half of the things that the main project was doing.

The result so far is that I get a very frustrating experience :sweat_smile: I am not that happy, but I wish I could help. I don’t know what happened but I smell drama, otherwise I don’t understand why it was done so quickly and without any announcement or even a change on the README guiding users to migrate to nixos-hardware :frowning:

I hope that nixos-hardware really is going to implement support and features for all the rpis (an rpi5 in my case) ! :muscle: Right now it is not looking good.

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From what I gathered from further downthread:

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I’m using the following skeleton to generate the SD image for my rpi3

{ lib, pkgs, config, modulesPath, ... }:

{
  nixpkgs.hostPlatform = "aarch64-linux";
  nixpkgs.overlays = [
    # fix the following error :
    # modprobe: FATAL: Module ahci not found in directory
    # https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/126755#issuecomment-869149243
    (_final: super: {
      makeModulesClosure = x:
        super.makeModulesClosure (x // { allowMissing = true; });
    })
  ];
  imports = [
    (modulesPath + "/installer/sd-card/sd-image-aarch64.nix")
  ];

  # compressing image when using binfmt is very time consuming
  # disable it. Not sure why we want to compress anyways?
  sdImage.compressImage = false;

  boot = {
    loader = {
      # https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/b72bde7c4a1f9c9bf1a161f0c267186ce3c6483c/nixos/modules/installer/sd-card/sd-image-aarch64.nix#L12
      # Use the extlinux boot loader. (NixOS wants to enable GRUB by default)
      grub.enable = false;
      # Enables the generation of /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf
      generic-extlinux-compatible.enable = lib.mkDefault true;
    };
    kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxKernel.packages.linux_rpi3;
    kernelParams = [ "cma=256M" ];
    initrd.availableKernelModules = [
      # Allows early (earlier) modesetting for the Raspberry Pi
      "vc4" "bcm2835_dma" "i2c_bcm2835"
    ];
    consoleLogLevel = lib.mkDefault 7;
  };

  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  ];

  # Enable the OpenSSH daemon.
  services.openssh.enable = true;

  networking = {
    hostName = "rpi3";
    interfaces.eth0 = {
      useDHCP = true;
    };
  };

  services.xserver.enable = false;

  users = {
    mutableUsers = false;
    # to be filled
  };

  # Preserve space by sacrificing documentation and history
  documentation.enable = false;
  documentation.doc.enable = false;
  documentation.info.enable = false;
  documentation.man.enable = false;
  documentation.nixos.enable = false;

  # This value determines the NixOS release with which your system is to be
  # compatible, in order to avoid breaking some software such as database
  # servers. You should change this only after NixOS release notes say you
  # should.
  system.stateVersion = "23.11";
}

and I am using the following command:

nix-build "<nixpkgs/nixos>" -A config.system.build.sdImage -I nixos-config=rpi3.nix -I nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/refs/tags/24.05.tar.gz