Darwinix

Darwinix is a flake designed for quickly spawning VMs on aarch64-darwin systems.

Usage

VMs

Currently, Darwinix supports creating a NixOS VM. You can spawn a NixOS VM using the following command:

nix run "github:matteo-pacini/darwinix#nixos"

This command will create the necessary VM files locally if they are not found (e.g., EFI, EFI varstore, disk, etc.) and then start the VM.

Futher arguments passed to the command invocation are sent to qemu-system-aarch64 directly, i.e.:

nix run "github:matteo-pacini/darwinix#nixos" -- -cdrom "/path/to/image.iso"

All VMS come with Internet and a CoreAudio-bound audio device. Copy-paste between host and guest is also supported.

QEMU needs to be compiled for the first run for this to work, as a few macOS 11.0+ functionalities are currently disabled in the official derivation.

RAM and CORES environment variables can be used to override the launch script defaults (half of the CPU cores, +1 if result is odd, and 1/4th of the available RAM.).

Example:

CORES=2 RAM=4 nix run "github:matteo-pacini/darwinix#nixos"

Commands

nixos-efi-format

The only command available in Darwinix at the moment is nixos-efi-format. This command formats the device passed as an argument with an EFI layout:

• 512MB for the EFI partition
• 4GB for swap
• The remaining space for the root partition (/)

To use nixos-efi-format, run the following command from within the VM, replacing /dev/sdX with your target device:

nix run "github:matteo-pacini/darwinix#nixos-efi-format" /dev/[sv]dX

This command will:

1. Create the partitions:
   • 512MB EFI partition (type ef00)
   • 4GB swap partition (type 8200)
   • Remaining space as the root partition (type 8300)
2. Format the partitions:
   • EFI partition as FAT32
   • Swap partition
   • Root partition as XFS
3. Mount the partitions and generate the initial NixOS configuration.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please open an issue or submit a pull request on GitHub.

License

Darwinix is released under the MIT License.