My biggest blog post yet, and it's about running (almost) vanilla NixOS on a (formerly) Android phone! This was 50% fun and 50% exhausting... you solve one issue and another one crops up right away... it was certainly an interesting educational experience.

I'm not explaining any basic technical concepts here, as I'm not a complete noob in phone ROMs and Linux.

Ask me any questions if you have them!

After commit 0bc3126c9cfa0b8c761483215c25382f831a7c6f in linux-firmware my system stopped booting (due to being unable to mount root fs). The bug isn't occurring all the time even with this commit, but I've still successfully tracked it down to this specific commit. Now I'm not sure where I can report it, as I could find info about maintainers of certain Linux subsystems, but not of linux-firmware or its constituent parts (like amd-ucode).

Edit: I've sent it to the person who authored the commit for the time being

Example config linked in readme! My ISP doesn't offer IPv6, so it might not fit your use case well, but it's a setup with multiple routing tables (one for vpn, one for direct internet access, one for no internet access)+multiple network namespaces (default namespace has the vpn interface, wan namespace has the vpn socket)+configured dnat/port forwarding which is hard to get right in such setups. It also takes port forwarding rules from another system's config, which was always my dream before even starting this project lol

"framework" is really the right choice of words because while it's well integrated with itself, it forces you to use itself, it doesn't integrate with networking.interfaces because it itself is a more featureful variant of networking.interfaces.

In my experience, this let me focus on writing the router itself, while previously half the time I felt that NixOS just doesn't provide enough customizability for routers. However, I don't offer many features right now, only device config/network namespace management/bridge creation/veth pair creation/dhcp/router advertisement/wireless access point creation. Obviously, there are many cases for which this won't be enough. If this isn't enough for you, open an issue and I'll try to add what you want (or better yet, do it yourself, as I probably wouldn't be able to test it).

Honestly I don't know why I made this, it clearly isn't worth it lol (Jesus, 5000kloc for this), but it was interesting to learn more about nftables (I also found a bug in Nix in the process). I will contribute to nftables docs some time later, as I found many undocumented or poorly documented parts, and some documentation that's flat out wrong.

Currently this can only export rules in json, but it shouldn't be too hard to write a transpiler into the nftables language.