Nixos: A purely functional linux distribution

  • Authors:

  • Eelco Dolstra;Andres LÖh;Nicolas Pierron

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of software technology, delft university of technology, postbus 5031, 2600 ga delft, the netherlands (e-mail: e.dolstra@tudelft.nl);Department of information and computing sciences, utrecht university, postbus 80. 089, 3508 tb utrecht, the netherlands (e-mail: andres@cs.uu.nl);Epita research and development laboratory, 14-16 rue voltaire, 94276 le kremlin-bicêtre cedex, france (e-mail: nicolas.b.pierron@gmail.com)

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Functional Programming
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Existing package and system configuration management tools suffer from an imperative model, where system administration actions such as package upgrades or changes to system configuration files are stateful: they destructively update the state of the system. This leads to many problems, such as the inability to roll back changes easily, to deploy multiple versions of a package side-by-side, to reproduce a configuration deterministically on another machine, or to reliably upgrade a system. In this paper we show that we can overcome these problems by moving to a purely functional system configuration model. This means that all static parts of a system (such as software packages, configuration files and system startup scripts) are built by pure functions and are immutable, stored in a way analogous to a heap in a purely functional language. We have implemented this model in NixOS, a non-trivial Linux distribution that uses the Nix package manager to build the entire system configuration from a modular, purely functional specification.