Nixcon 2019 Nix On Droid - Slides

Nix-on-Droid
when the low-hanging fruit is also the ripest one
Alexander Sosedkin (@t184256)

recently Red Hat, formerly a plasma physicist
2019-10-26
Running your favourite userland on mobile devices
Get rid of Android and port your distro
Recompile it with Bionic (Android’s special libc)
Get root and do what it takes (usually a chroot)
Run it under userspace chroot emulation
2
Boring details
3
Nix-on-Droid
It’s Nix, running on Android, under proot:
userspace bind-mounting emulation implemented through ptrace.
This was done to avoid recompiling nixpkgs and reusing aarch64
packages from Hydra.
It also comes with an terminal emulator app that handles the
bootstrapping process.
A few more hacks are also in-place because Bionic is different.
4
Decomposition
Nix-on-Droid is made up of:
a cross-compiled Bionic proot,
an Android terminal emulator app,
Nix expressions for a boostrap zipball and
a Nix channel.
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proot
Intercepts le-system access to rewrite /nix/store to
/data/data/com.termux.nix/files/usr/nix. Also rewrites
access to /etc/ to make glibc happy while we’re on it.
Also, emulates hardlinks with symlinks.
Also, effectively breaks other ptrace users.
Also, makes everything slower and buggier (sigh).
But it makes it superportable: no root, no user namespaces.
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App
It is a fork of Termux-the-terminal-emulator app, which downloads a
bootstrap zipball from https://nix-on-droid.unboiled.info, unpacks it,
sets up symlinks and runs the login script, which, it turns, runs proot
and, nally, drops you into a Nix-powered shell.
On subsequent launches, it also has to resolve a maze of broken
symlinks that points to the login script, which is now managed by Nix.
Has a ‘failsafe’ functionality that drops you into an Android shell that
one could use in case everything went up in ames.
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Bootstrap zipball
It’s a mess.
It starts with cross-compiling an Android-geared fork of proot with
Android NDK targeting Bionic.
Then it takes an o cial Nix release tarball, which undergoes minor
modi cations, performs some light initialization through QEMU’s user
mode emulation and gets repacked into an esoteric format invented
for Termux.
Then you put it to some HTTP server so that the app can download it
on the rst startup.
It used to be a giant shell script, but @Gerschtli rewrote it all
and now it is built with Nix. 8
Channel and update path
Finally (again, thanks to @Gerschtli) nix-on-droid-bootstrap repository
doubles as a Nix channel, so that the scripts that are used to ‘dive’
into the Nix-powered environment are also managed by Nix itself, and
the user has an actual upgrade path.
Currently, the outermost Bionic proot binary is the last thing that’s
not under control of Nix, but this is planned to change.
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Limitations
You’ve installed Nix from a regular user
under Android, with no root and weird everything.
Proot complicates and slows down things.
Currently only aarch64 and (untested) i686.
10
Story
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A quest for a lighter laptop
This spring I wanted a lighter travel laptop,

and ended up eyeing up an awesome Android tablet.
Why not a tablet? I don’t need much from it, but… could it run Nix?
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If I get a tablet, I want it to stay a tablet
Even if it could run nixos-mobile, I’ll miss Android.
Porting aside, mobile UX is years behind.
So, what I wanted was Nix on Android.
I’ve also just read @matthewbauer’s posts on statically linking Nix
and cross-compilation and I felt ready.
13
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It just worked (thanks to you)!
I bought that tablet and I had it working the rst evening.
I didn’t even get to compile anything!
The hardest part was to understand that I don’t need to do anything.
Nix release tarball already ships with everything you need to run Nix.
I got proot to pretend that the store is at /nix/store and fake a
couple of les in /etc. I downloaded and unpacked the o cial Nix
tarball.
Boom, Nix working on Android. Playing by Android rules and
limitations.
15
Evolution
Over time, the thing evolved a lot:
I’ve cut out the middle man and forked the terminal app to run Nix
I wrote a Nix expression for cross-compiling proot
(thanks, @matthewbauer).
I’ve reached ‘just works for me’ stage.
@Gerschtli rewrote the building with Nix.
@Gerschtli put my hacks under Nix control and
blessed the project with an upgrade path.
It was ju-ust accepted into F-Droid.
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Possibilities / limitations
You can install the app, open a terminal and get a shell with Nix.
You are encouraged to install home-manager.
You can install software from nixpkgs / binary cache.
You can reuse your con gs.
No root, user namespaces or SELinux disabling required.
You need aarch64 (or maybe i686).
It’s 3-10 times slower than my i7 laptop.
You’re running everything as an unprivileged user…
… under Android, an exotic distro. Cooperation is lacking.
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What to do with that?
I have mosh, neovim, git and xonsh on a 270 g tablet.
I’ve typeset this presentation (pandoc+xelatex) on it.
And all Android experience is still there, intact.
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What to do with that?
I have mosh, neovim, git and xonsh on a 270 g tablet.
I’ve typeset this presentation (pandoc+xelatex) on it.
And all Android experience is still there, intact.
But I think there’s a bigger question.
We have a quirky, but uniform target platform in our pockets.
Think nix-darwin, but with more compatible devices in the wild.
I don’t know why don’t we harvest this fruit.
18
Questions
Mine:
Why don’t we target Android if it’s so easy?
Could we make my project a tad more o cial?
Could I recompile everything, but get out of proot?
What could be the endgame and is it worth the effort?
I’m eager to hear what you think.
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Thank you
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Nix-on-Droid

when the low-hanging fruit is also the ripest one

Alexander Sosedkin (@t184256)

This spring I wanted a lighter travel laptop,

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