Archived because dotfiles of apple-silicon hosts are merged to https://github.com/vilvo/dotfiles

NixOS dotfiles on Apple M1 devices

Why

Great laptops with Linux. If you do aarch64 development, native is better than cross-compilation.

Basic usage

nix flake update
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#blub --impure

--impure is required because of Apple firmware at /boot/asahi

Prerequisities

• Read these instructions
• Instead of just formatting the new root partition, use cryptsetup for LUKS

Disk encryption with systemd-boot

When you have created the root partition to fill up the free space, use cryptsetup:

cryptsetup luksFormat -type luks1 /dev/nvme0n1p5
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p5 encrypted
pvcreate /dev/mapper/encrypted
vgcreate vg /dev/mapper/encrypted
lvcreate -L 16G -n swap vg
lvcreate -l '100%FREE' -n nixos vg
mkfs.ext4 -L nixos /dev/vg/nixos
mkswap -L swap /dev/vg/swap
swapon /dev/vg/swap

Continue with the instructions from NixOS Configuration.

After you've run nixos-generate-config, edit configuration.nix:

boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable = true;
boot.loader.efi.canTouchEfiVariables = false;
# check the uuid of your partition with lsblk -f - NOTE: "encrypted" must match whatever you set with cryptsetup luksOpen
boot.initrd.luks.devices."encrypted".device = "/dev/disk/by-uuid/<uuid_of_your_/dev/nvme0n1p5>";

Continue the configuration and finish the NixOS Installation. Boot and type your LUKS password in NixOS Stage 1.

What if something goes wrong?

• Read these instructions.
• Really. The instructions covers all but encrypting your disk.
• Really, even if you f your M1 internal NVMe - it covers the recovery with another Apple device.
  • Use idevicerestore and macOS 12.4.

Thanks

• @tpwrules for nixos-apple-silicon
• @yusernapora for above with flakes - blog post worth reading

I only added disk encryption and simplified the flake config with M1 host only.