Booting from the netboot media (PXE)

Advanced users may wish to install NixOS using an existing PXE or iPXE setup.

These instructions assume that you have an existing PXE or iPXE infrastructure and simply want to add the NixOS installer as another option. To build the necessary files from a recent version of nixpkgs, you can run:

nix-build -A netboot nixos/release.nix

This will create a result directory containing: * bzImage – the Linux kernel * initrd – the initrd file * netboot.ipxe – an example ipxe script demonstrating the appropriate kernel command line arguments for this image

If you’re using plain PXE, configure your boot loader to use the bzImage and initrd files and have it provide the same kernel command line arguments found in netboot.ipxe.

If you’re using iPXE, depending on how your HTTP/FTP/etc. server is configured you may be able to use netboot.ipxe unmodified, or you may need to update the paths to the files to match your server’s directory layout

In the future we may begin making these files available as build products from hydra at which point we will update this documentation with instructions on how to obtain them either for placing on a dedicated TFTP server or to boot them directly over the internet.