research-article

NixOS: a purely functional Linux distribution

Authors:

Andres LöhAuthors Info & Claims

ICFP '08: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

Pages 367 - 378

https://doi.org/10.1145/1411204.1411255

Published: 20 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Existing package and system configuration management tools suffer from an imperative model, where system administration actions such as upgrading packages 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 run 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 analogously to a heap in a purely function 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 purely functional specification.

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Willenbring JShende SGamblin T(2024)Providing a Flexible and Comprehensive Software Stack Via Spack, an Extreme-Scale Scientific Software Stack, and Software Development KitsComputing in Science and Engineering10.1109/MCSE.2024.339501626:1(20-30)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
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Raj ACanady RDas SGokhale APerarnau S(2024)Reinforcement Learning-based Performance-aware Energy Management in 5G Base Stations2024 16th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS)10.1109/COMSNETS59351.2024.10427091(568-571)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMSNETS59351.2024.10427091
Gollenstede NKulau UDietrich CEgger BLee D(2023)reUpNix: Reconfigurable and Updateable Embedded SystemsProceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems10.1145/3589610.3596273(40-51)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
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Index Terms

NixOS: a purely functional Linux distribution
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Functional languages
    2. Software configuration management and version control systems

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NixOS: a purely functional Linux distribution
ICFP '08

Existing package and system configuration management tools suffer from an imperative model, where system administration actions such as upgrading packages or changes to system configuration files are stateful: they destructively update the state of the ...
Nixos: A purely functional linux distribution

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 ...

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICFP '08: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

September 2008

422 pages

ISBN:9781595939197

DOI:10.1145/1411204

General Chair:
James Hook
Portland State University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Peter Thiemann
Universität Freiburg, Germany

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 43, Issue 9
ICFP '08
September 2008
399 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1411203
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

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Published: 20 September 2008

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ICFP08

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ICFP08: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 20 - 28, 2008

BC, Victoria, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 333 of 1,064 submissions, 31%

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ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

October 12 - 18, 2025

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MCSE.2024.3395016
Raj ACanady RDas SGokhale APerarnau S(2024)Reinforcement Learning-based Performance-aware Energy Management in 5G Base Stations2024 16th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS)10.1109/COMSNETS59351.2024.10427091(568-571)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMSNETS59351.2024.10427091
Gollenstede NKulau UDietrich CEgger BLee D(2023)reUpNix: Reconfigurable and Updateable Embedded SystemsProceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems10.1145/3589610.3596273(40-51)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589610.3596273
Raj APerarnau SGokhale A(2023)A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Performance-aware Reduction in Power Consumption of Data Center Compute Nodes2023 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E)10.1109/IC2E59103.2023.00022(121-130)Online publication date: 25-Sep-2023
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Zakaria FScogland TGamblin TMaltzahn C(2022)Mapping Out the HPC Dependency ChaosSC22: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis10.1109/SC41404.2022.00039(1-12)Online publication date: Nov-2022
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