Hardware

Required

• An x86_64 PC that boots in UEFI mode. The installer stops on legacy BIOS boots.
• Secure Boot turned off in the firmware settings.
• One whole disk for the system. It’s erased; there’s no dual boot.
• Enough RAM to build the system. The install test runs with 6 GB; less hasn’t been tried.

What’s tested

• Every release: CI installs from the ISO’s live system onto a QEMU/KVM virtual machine with UEFI, then unlocks and boots the installed disk. The config’s boot tests also boot both profiles in a VM.
• By hand: the maintainer has installed from the ISO on two laptops.
• Not tested: NVIDIA drivers, laptops with two GPUs, and Wi-Fi in a VM (CI checks only that the ISO has what Wi-Fi needs).

If yours works or doesn’t, an issue with the output of lspci -nn helps the next person.

Detected during the install

• Laptops: a battery turns on the laptop extras (battery reporting, sensors, and thermald on Intel).
• Fingerprint readers: a USB reader from Goodix, Synaptics, Validity, Elan, Egis, FocalTech, AuthenTec, UPEK or FPC is offered for login and sudo.
• NVIDIA cards: the installer shows the card and asks which driver to use. Laptops with an Intel or AMD GPU as well also need PRIME set up in a module of your own.
• Everything else (disk controllers, Wi-Fi chips, CPU microcode) comes from nixos-generate-config and the redistributable firmware NixOS ships.

Thunderbolt and USB4

Devices have to be approved once, in the desktop’s settings or with boltctl. Approvals are kept across reboots. The IOMMU limits what a plugged-in device can read from memory.