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NixOS: A purely functional Linux distribution

Part of: JFP Research Articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2010

EELCO DOLSTRA ,
ANDRES LÖH  and
NICOLAS PIERRON
EELCO DOLSTRA
Affiliation:
Department of Software Technology, Delft University of Technology, Postbus 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands (e-mail: [email protected])
ANDRES LÖH
Affiliation:
Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Postbus 80. 089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands (e-mail: [email protected])
NICOLAS PIERRON
Affiliation:
EPITA Research and Development Laboratory, 14-16 rue Voltaire, 94276 Le Kremlin-Bicêtre cedex, France (e-mail: [email protected])
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Abstract

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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Functional Programming , Volume 20 , Special Issue 5-6: Dedicated to ICFP 2008 , November 2010 , pp. 577 - 615
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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