Release 22.11 (“Raccoon”, 2022.11/??)
Support is planned until the end of June 2023, handing over to
23.05.
Highlights
In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release
has the following highlights:
During cross-compilation, tests are now executed if the test
suite can be executed by the build platform. This is the case
when doing “native” cross-compilation where the build and host
platforms are largely the same, but the nixpkgs’ cross
compilation infrastructure is used, e.g.
pkgsStatic and pkgsLLVM.
Another possibility is that the build platform is a superset
of the host platform, e.g. when cross-compiling from
x86_64-unknown-linux to
i686-unknown-linux. The predicate gating
test suite execution is the newly added
canExecute predicate: You can e.g. check if
stdenv.buildPlatform can execute binaries
built for stdenv.hostPlatform (i.e.
produced by stdenv.cc) by evaluating
stdenv.buildPlatform.canExecute stdenv.hostPlatform.
PHP now defaults to PHP 8.1, updated from 8.0.
New Services
appvm,
Nix based app VMs. Available as
virtualisation.appvm.
dragonflydb,
a modern replacement for Redis and Memcached. Available as
services.dragonflydb.
infnoise,
a hardware True Random Number Generator dongle. Available as
services.infnoise.
persistent-evdev,
a daemon to add virtual proxy devices that mirror a physical
input device but persist even if the underlying hardware is
hot-plugged. Available as
services.persistent-evdev.
Backward Incompatibilities
The isCompatible predicate checking CPU
compatibility is no longer exposed by the platform sets
generated using lib.systems.elaborate. In
most cases you will want to use the new
canExecute predicate instead which also
considers the kernel / syscall interface. It is briefly
described in the release’s
highlights
section.
lib.systems.parse.isCompatible still
exists, but has changed semantically: Architectures with
differing endianness modes are no longer considered
compatible.
The isPowerPC predicate, found on
platform attrsets
(hostPlatform,
buildPlatform,
targetPlatform, etc) has been removed in
order to reduce confusion. The predicate was was defined such
that it matches only the 32-bit big-endian members of the
POWER/PowerPC family, despite having a name which would imply
a broader set of systems. If you were using this predicate,
you can replace foo.isPowerPC with
(with foo; isPower && is32bit && isBigEndian).
Other Notable Changes
A new module was added for the Saleae Logic device family,
providing the options
hardware.saleae-logic.enable and
hardware.saleae-logic.package.
Matrix Synapse now requires entries in the
state_group_edges table to be unique, in
order to prevent accidentally introducing duplicate
information (for example, because a database backup was
restored multiple times). If your Synapse database already has
duplicate rows in this table, this could fail with an error
and require manual remediation.
memtest86+ was updated from 5.00-coreboot-002 to 6.00-beta2.
It is now the upstream version from https://www.memtest.org/,
as coreboot’s fork is no longer available.