Nix PIE

Nix PIE is the Nix and NixOS configuration used at EPITA for the school's computer labs (about 1,000 computers accross the 6 campuses in France).

NixOS images

Computers at EPITA use network boot (PXE) to run their operating system. We provide multiple configurations called "images" that contain different sets of software depending on the course needs or student year. At boot, users are displayed a menu on which they can choose the configuration they need to use. The kernel and initrd is then downloaded through HTTPS and the rootfs is downloaded using the BitTorrent protocol in NixOS Stage 1.

Repository structure

The repository structure is similar to the official nixpkgs repository.

• images contains all the NixOS configurations provided by the flake
• lib contains Nix functions used in Nix PIE
• modules contains NixOS modules
• pkgs contains Nix derivations of software packaged by us
• profiles contains shared NixOS configuration between images
• tests contains NixOS tests of our configurations

Testing

To test NixOS configurations, one can start a VM using the following commands:

# Build the VM
nix build -L .#nixosConfigurations.<NixOS configuration name>.config.system.build.vm

# Start the VM
./result/bin/run-<NixOS configuration name>-vm -smp 4 -m 8192 -vga qxl

# Delete the generated disk image to reset the state of the VM
rm *.qcow2