GNU Guix - News: Porting Guix and GuixSD

Porting Guix and GuixSD

Item posted by Ludovic Courtès <civodul> on Mon 07 Sep 2015 12:37:58 PM UTC.

Quite a lot has happened lately when it comes to porting Guix and GuixSD to other systems.

A few weeks ago, Manolis Ragkousis announced the completion of the GSoC project whose purpose was to port Guix to the Hurd.  The system distribution, GuixSD, cannot run GNU/Hurd yet, but the package manager itself can both cross-compile from GNU/Linux to GNU/Hurd and build natively on GNU/Hurd.  The work of Manolis is being gradually merged in the main branch.

More recently, Mark H Weaver posted a series of patches porting GuixSD to MIPS (Lemote Yeeloong), making it the first GuixSD port to non-Intel-compatible hardware (the package manager itself has supported mips64el for two years already.)  By removing several platform-specific assumptions, this work paves the way for future ports.

Lastly, we are glad to report the donation of two ARM machines for our build farm.  They will allow us to continuously test the ARM port, which was completed earlier this year, and to publish pre-built binaries on our build farm.  We are grateful to the donors whose contribution makes a big difference for the development of Guix on ARM.  If you would like to help out with hardware and/or hosting, please get in touch!

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a functional package manager for the GNU system.  The Guix System Distribution or GuixSD is an advanced distribution of the GNU system that relies on GNU Guix and respects the user's freedom.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection.  Guix uses low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, except that packages are defined as native Guile modules, using extensions to the Scheme language.  GuixSD offers a declarative approach to operating system configuration management, and is highly customizable and hackable.

GuixSD can be used on an i686 or x86_64 machine.  It is also possible to use Guix on top of an already installed GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el and armv7.