This Week in NixOS, Week 33 2025

This week I learned about bashless activation, an effort to create a boot setup that doesn't need any interpreted scripts. Here's a tracking issue in Nixpkgs, with the core pull request that implements most of this. I'm not familiar with the stage 2 init script of NixOS, but this seems an interesting point to start reading more about it.

Haumea, the hardware host that hosts the hydra.nixos.org database, has been throwing correctable ECC errors for a while now, so the infra team discussed options to upgrade to a beefier host.

I heard about nix-topology, a project that automatically generates infrastructure and network diagrams straight out of your NixOS configuration. Its documentation looks thorough and seems simple to use. I haven't tried it myself yet, but it's on my TODOs in order to replace my custom mermaid diagrams.