The old GRUB menu builder script is quite slow, typically taking
several seconds. This is a real annoyance since it's run every time
you switch to a new configuration. Therefore this patch replaces the
Bash script with a much faster Perl script. In a VirtualBox test, the
execution time went from 2.7s to 0.1s. The Perl version is also more
correct because it uses XML to get the GRUB configuration (through
builtins.toXML), so there are no shell escaping issues.
The new script currently lacks support for subconfigurations defined
through "nesting.children".
Systemd's systemd-vconsole-setup.service reads locale and console
font/keymap settings from these files. In particular, it sets the
virtual console to UTF-8 mode depending on the LANG setting.
This removed the need for the kbd job.
- The new option 'apacheHttpd' determines the version of the Apache
HTTP Server that's being used by this module. The default version
is Apache 2.2.x, as before.
- The new option 'configFile' allows users specify their own custom
config file for the web server instead of being limited to the one
that this module generates.
The environment variable "NIXOS_EXTRA_MODULES" is now checked to
contain a path to a file similar to modules/module-list.nix.
This gives the ability to include nixos modules that are not in the
nixos source tree.
This can be useful for modules that are still experimental, or which
aren't useful for other nixos users. Of course, this was already
possible to do this using a forked nixos tree, but with this
functionality, you can just rely on the nixos channel, easing things a
lot.
Ugly hack to get around the error "a string that refers to a store
path cannot be appended to a path". The underlying problem is that
you cannot do
"${./file1} ${./file2}"
but you can do
" ${./file1} ${./file2}"
Obviously we should allow the first case as well.
This allows hiding the implementation details for how to represent logstash
config types that don't directly map to nix expressions, particularly floats,
hashes, and name-value pair sets with repeated names. Instead of setting
__type and value directly, the user now uses these convenience functions to
generate their logstash config.
Since the logstash config file seemed very similar to a nixexpr, I decided
to map directly from nixexprs to logstash configs. I didn't realize until
too far in that this solution was probably way over-engineered, but it
works.
The new option ‘skins’ allows specifying a list of directories
providing skins to be added to the MediaWiki installation. The
‘defaultSkin’ option just sets the default.
resolvconf prefers a locally running BIND resolver over the forwarders; we just
have to tell it whether we have one or not. We use 'config.services.bind.enable'
to make that decision, assuming that people are not going to configure a local
BIND that won't respond to queries on 127.0.0.1. If we run into such a (weird)
case, then we'll need to introduce another variable for that purpose which can
be set independently from 'config.services.bind.enable'.
BusyBox doesn't handle the "auto" filesystem type very well: fsck will
just ignore such filesystems, and mount will only work properly if the
required kernel module is already loaded. Therefore, use blkid to
determine the filesystem type.
Also generate an /etc/fstab in the initrd rootfs on the fly. This is
useful if you're dropped into an emergency shell since it allows you
to say "fsck /dev/sda1" or "mount /dev/sda" and have the right thing
happen.
So it turns out that BusyBox doesn't auto-load modules for filesystems
that have type "auto", e.g. it doesn't figure out that it should load
the "iso9660" module should be loaded when mounting the CD-ROM. We
don't want to give the root FS on the CD type "iso9660", because that
breaks booting from a USB stick created by unetbootin. So make sure
the "iso9660" module is loaded.
Using BusyBox instead of Bash plus a bunch of other tools gives us a
much more feature-full, yet smaller initrd. In particular, BusyBox
contains networking commands such as ip and a DHCP client, useful for
NFS boots. It's also much more convenient for rescue situations
because the shell has builtin readline support and there are many more
tools (including vi).
