NixOS / CPU Type - Intel

[c4710n]

I'm using a M1 MBP, and NixOS CPU Type - Intel is not available for now.

I noticed the NixOS card on roadmap has been marked as done. It that(NixOS Intel) still on the plan?

[kdrag0n]

None of the current x86 emulators for Linux can run NixOS correctly on ARM. NixOS tries to use seccomp-bpf, which Rosetta and alternatives don't support.

If you want to run x86 programs in NixOS, I'd recommend doing it like this, but it has its own issues with Rosetta: NixOS/nixpkgs#209242 (comment)

Looks like it's possible to disable seccomp by modifying nix.conf so I'll leave this open, but it's not planned.

[jpittis]

Do we have any sense if any x86 emulators will support eBPF in the future?

For context, I'm currently using eBPF with OrbStack on aarch64 and it works great! I'm looking forward to the day I'll also be able to do that on amd64.

[kdrag0n]

@jpittis I don't think it's possible to support eBPF correctly. Tracing will be broken due to differences in register sets, syscall numbers, etc. that can't be reliably translated without manually disassembling and inspecting bytecode The same applies to seccomp (cBPF).

[kdrag0n]

OrbStack can now run x86 NixOS binaries correctly under Rosetta, so I'd highly recommend using NixOS' native multi-architecture support instead.

[xukai92]

how does "NixOS' native multi-architecture support" work? is it what's suggested in #437?

[kdrag0n]

@xukai92 Like this, with an x86_64 nixpkgs source: NixOS/nixpkgs#209242 (comment)

#437 is for building packages.

[kdrag0n]

Closing as infeasible for now. NixOS has great multi-arch support so I'd recommend using that instead.