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I'm surprised to see no mention of Guix. It solves all of these issues, and already has a good story both for cross and native builds on a variety of architectures.

Adding new targets is deceptively easy, just copy an existing template and substitute your values.

https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/branch/master/gnu/system/...

https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/branch/master/gnu/bootloa...

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Does guix have any advantage here over nix?

Lisp

I didn't know Nix had support for embedded systems. Where are the images defined?

What do you mean by image? In Nix you instantiate a NixOS system and specify the architecture. There are a number of tools to build a disk image from a NixOS system.

$ my-arm-system = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem { system = "aarch64-linux"; modules = [ ./configuration.nix ]; };

$ :b arm-system.config.system.build.images.iso

PSA:

nixos-rebuild build-vm (--flake DIR#HOSTNAME / configuration.nix)

./result/bin/SCRIPT

to build and launch a nixos vm with qemu.

IMO the nixos-rebuild scripts are unnecessary and just obscures what’s being built.

build-vm is the same as building the configs “config.system.build.vm” attribute.

nixos-rebuild is fine for getting started but you end up needing to use the attribute path to do anything more complicated like CI caching or inspecting the drvPath.

Guix has some security advantages (grafts for security patches, full source bootstrapping, 100% OSS) and its documentation is generally thought to be superior to Nix.

For me the main downside of Guix is that the maintenance team is very small, which does not seem sustainable.

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