This seems to have combined badly with the systemd upgrade, we'll revert
for now and revisit after the 14.04 branch.
This reverts commit ad80532881, reversing
changes made to 1c5d3c7883.
Using pkgs.lib on the spine of module evaluation is problematic
because the pkgs argument depends on the result of module
evaluation. To prevent an infinite recursion, pkgs and some of the
modules are evaluated twice, which is inefficient. Using ‘with lib’
prevents this problem.
Currently switch-to-configuration.pl uses system() calls to interact
with DBus. This can be error prone, especially when we are parsing
output that could change. In this commit, almost all calls to the
systemctl binary have been replaced with equivalent operations via DBus.
You can now say:
systemd.containers.foo.config =
{ services.openssh.enable = true;
services.openssh.ports = [ 2022 ];
users.extraUsers.root.openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = [ "ssh-dss ..." ];
};
which defines a NixOS instance with the given configuration running
inside a lightweight container.
You can also manage the configuration of the container independently
from the host:
systemd.containers.foo.path = "/nix/var/nix/profiles/containers/foo";
where "path" is a NixOS system profile. It can be created/updated by
doing:
$ nix-env --set -p /nix/var/nix/profiles/containers/foo \
-f '<nixos>' -A system -I nixos-config=foo.nix
The container configuration (foo.nix) should define
boot.isContainer = true;
to optimise away the building of a kernel and initrd. This is done
automatically when using the "config" route.
On the host, a lightweight container appears as the service
"container-<name>.service". The container is like a regular NixOS
(virtual) machine, except that it doesn't have its own kernel. It has
its own root file system (by default /var/lib/containers/<name>), but
shares the Nix store of the host (as a read-only bind mount). It also
has access to the network devices of the host.
Currently, if the configuration of the container changes, running
"nixos-rebuild switch" on the host will cause the container to be
rebooted. In the future we may want to send some message to the
container so that it can activate the new container configuration
without rebooting.
Containers are not perfectly isolated yet. In particular, the host's
/sys/fs/cgroup is mounted (writable!) in the guest.
