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I wish remote build/deploy for Raspberry Pi was in a better state - it seems like a perfect fit for NixOS.

I've got x86 servers running NixOS that are deployed using Colmena, but it seems to fall apart when I add cross compilation into the mix.

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I'm running NixOS on a raspberry pi and I deploy to it with deploy-rs¹. This works pretty well for me. My dev machine is an Apple Silicon laptop with nix-darwin installed and I use its nix.linux-builder module to run an aarch64-linux VM as a remote builder to build the rpi's system. All this means the rpi never has to do any building itself, and doesn't even need the nixpkgs source installed either.

If you want to do this yourself, I recommend using https://github.com/nix-community/raspberry-pi-nix so the system is configured much more closely to how the stock raspberry pi image works. The benefit of this is better reliability of stuff like bluetooth.

¹https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs

cross compilation is hit-or-miss, but using qemu/binfmt works just fine, if a bit slow.

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