nixpkgs/nixos/doc/manual/release-notes/rl-2211.section.md

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.

• The nixpkgs.hostPlatform and nixpkgs.buildPlatform options have been added. These cover and override the nixpkgs.{system,localSystem,crossSystem} options.

  • hostPlatform is the platform or "system" string of the NixOS system described by the configuration.
  • buildPlatform is the platform that is responsible for building the NixOS configuration. It defaults to the hostPlatform, for a non-cross build configuration. To cross compile, set buildPlatform to a different value.

  The new options convey the same information, but with fewer options, and following the Nixpkgs terminology.

  The existing options nixpkgs.{system,localSystem,crossSystem} have not been formally deprecated, to allow for evaluation of the change and to allow for a transition period so that in time the ecosystem can switch without breaking compatibility with any supported NixOS release.

• nixos-generate-config now generates configurations that can be built in pure mode. This is achieved by setting the new nixpkgs.hostPlatform option.

  You may have to unset the system parameter in lib.nixosSystem, or similarly remove definitions of the nixpkgs.{system,localSystem,crossSystem} options.

  Alternatively, you can remove the hostPlatform line and use NixOS like you would in NixOS 22.05 and earlier.

• PHP now defaults to PHP 8.1, updated from 8.0.

• hardware.nvidia has a new option open that can be used to opt in the opensource version of NVIDIA kernel driver. Note that the driver's support for GeForce and Workstation GPUs is still alpha quality, see NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules for the official announcement.

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.

• expressvpn, the CLI client for ExpressVPN. Available as services.expressvpn.

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.

• ngrok has been upgraded from 2.3.40 to 3.0.4. Please see the upgrade guide and changelog. Notably, breaking changes are that the config file format has changed and support for single hypen arguments was dropped.

• 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).

• The Barco ClickShare driver/client package pkgs.clickshare-csc1 and the option programs.clickshare-csc1.enable have been removed, as it requires qt4, which reached its end-of-life 2015 and will no longer be supported by nixpkgs. According to Barco many of their base unit models can be used with Google Chrome and the Google Cast extension.

• PHP 7.4 is no longer supported due to upstream not supporting this version for the entire lifecycle of the 22.11 release.

• (Neo)Vim can not be configured with configure.pathogen anymore to reduce maintainance burden. Use configure.packages instead.

• k3s no longer supports docker as runtime due to upstream dropping support.

Other Notable Changes

• The xplr package has been updated from 0.18.0 to 0.19.0, which brings some breaking changes. See the upstream release notes for more details.

• 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.

• zfs was updated from 2.1.4 to 2.1.5, enabling it to be used with Linux kernel 5.18.

• 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.