Release 22.11 (“Raccoon”, 2022.11/??)
Support is planned until the end of June 2023, handing over to
23.05.
Highlights
In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release
has the following highlights:
During cross-compilation, tests are now executed if the test
suite can be executed by the build platform. This is the case
when doing “native” cross-compilation where the build and host
platforms are largely the same, but the nixpkgs’ cross
compilation infrastructure is used, e.g.
pkgsStatic and pkgsLLVM.
Another possibility is that the build platform is a superset
of the host platform, e.g. when cross-compiling from
x86_64-unknown-linux to
i686-unknown-linux. The predicate gating
test suite execution is the newly added
canExecute predicate: You can e.g. check if
stdenv.buildPlatform can execute binaries
built for stdenv.hostPlatform (i.e.
produced by stdenv.cc) by evaluating
stdenv.buildPlatform.canExecute stdenv.hostPlatform.
The nixpkgs.hostPlatform and
nixpkgs.buildPlatform options have been
added. These cover and override the
nixpkgs.{system,localSystem,crossSystem}
options.
hostPlatform is the platform or
system string of the
NixOS system described by the configuration.
buildPlatform is the platform that is
responsible for building the NixOS configuration. It
defaults to the hostPlatform, for a
non-cross build configuration. To cross compile, set
buildPlatform to a different value.
The new options convey the same information, but with fewer
options, and following the Nixpkgs terminology.
The existing options
nixpkgs.{system,localSystem,crossSystem}
have not been formally deprecated, to allow for evaluation of
the change and to allow for a transition period so that in
time the ecosystem can switch without breaking compatibility
with any supported NixOS release.
nixos-generate-config now generates
configurations that can be built in pure mode. This is
achieved by setting the new
nixpkgs.hostPlatform option.
You may have to unset the system parameter
in lib.nixosSystem, or similarly remove
definitions of the
nixpkgs.{system,localSystem,crossSystem}
options.
Alternatively, you can remove the
hostPlatform line and use NixOS like you
would in NixOS 22.05 and earlier.
PHP now defaults to PHP 8.1, updated from 8.0.
hardware.nvidia has a new option
open that can be used to opt in the
opensource version of NVIDIA kernel driver. Note that the
driver’s support for GeForce and Workstation GPUs is still
alpha quality, see
NVIDIA
Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules for the
official announcement.
New Services
appvm,
Nix based app VMs. Available as
virtualisation.appvm.
dragonflydb,
a modern replacement for Redis and Memcached. Available as
services.dragonflydb.
infnoise,
a hardware True Random Number Generator dongle. Available as
services.infnoise.
persistent-evdev,
a daemon to add virtual proxy devices that mirror a physical
input device but persist even if the underlying hardware is
hot-plugged. Available as
services.persistent-evdev.
schleuder, a
mailing list manager with PGP support. Enable using
services.schleuder.
expressvpn,
the CLI client for ExpressVPN. Available as
services.expressvpn.
Backward Incompatibilities
The isCompatible predicate checking CPU
compatibility is no longer exposed by the platform sets
generated using lib.systems.elaborate. In
most cases you will want to use the new
canExecute predicate instead which also
considers the kernel / syscall interface. It is briefly
described in the release’s
highlights
section.
lib.systems.parse.isCompatible still
exists, but has changed semantically: Architectures with
differing endianness modes are no longer considered
compatible.
ngrok has been upgraded from 2.3.40 to
3.0.4. Please see
the
upgrade guide and
changelog.
Notably, breaking changes are that the config file format has
changed and support for single hypen arguments was dropped.
i18n.supportedLocales is now by default
only generated with the locales set in
i18n.defaultLocale and
i18n.extraLocaleSettings. This got
partially copied over from the minimal profile and reduces the
final system size by up to 200MB. If you require all locales
installed set the option to
[ "all" ].
The isPowerPC predicate, found on
platform attrsets
(hostPlatform,
buildPlatform,
targetPlatform, etc) has been removed in
order to reduce confusion. The predicate was was defined such
that it matches only the 32-bit big-endian members of the
POWER/PowerPC family, despite having a name which would imply
a broader set of systems. If you were using this predicate,
you can replace foo.isPowerPC with
(with foo; isPower && is32bit && isBigEndian).
bsp-layout no longer uses the command
cycle to switch to other window layouts, as
it got replaced by the commands previous
and next.
The Barco ClickShare driver/client package
pkgs.clickshare-csc1 and the option
programs.clickshare-csc1.enable have been
removed, as it requires qt4, which reached
its end-of-life 2015 and will no longer be supported by
nixpkgs.
According
to Barco many of their base unit models can be used
with Google Chrome and the Google Cast extension.
PHP 7.4 is no longer supported due to upstream not supporting
this version for the entire lifecycle of the 22.11 release.
riak package removed along with
services.riak module, due to lack of
maintainer to update the package.
(Neo)Vim can not be configured with
configure.pathogen anymore to reduce
maintainance burden. Use configure.packages
instead.
k3s no longer supports docker as runtime
due to upstream dropping support.
Other Notable Changes
The xplr package has been updated from
0.18.0 to 0.19.0, which brings some breaking changes. See the
upstream
release notes for more details.
A new module was added for the Saleae Logic device family,
providing the options
hardware.saleae-logic.enable and
hardware.saleae-logic.package.
Matrix Synapse now requires entries in the
state_group_edges table to be unique, in
order to prevent accidentally introducing duplicate
information (for example, because a database backup was
restored multiple times). If your Synapse database already has
duplicate rows in this table, this could fail with an error
and require manual remediation.
zfs was updated from 2.1.4 to 2.1.5,
enabling it to be used with Linux kernel 5.18.
memtest86+ was updated from 5.00-coreboot-002 to 6.00-beta2.
It is now the upstream version from https://www.memtest.org/,
as coreboot’s fork is no longer available.
There is a new module for the thunar
program (the Xfce file manager), which depends on the
xfconf dbus service, and also has a dbus
service and a systemd unit. The option
services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce.thunarPlugins
has been renamed to
programs.thunar.plugins, and in a future
release it may be removed.