Guix

GNU Guix and GuixSD 0.13.0 released

Ludovic Courtès — 2017-05-22

We are pleased to announce the new release of GNU Guix and GuixSD, version 0.13.0!

The release comes with GuixSD USB installation images, a virtual machine image of GuixSD, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries.

It’s been 5 months since the previous release, during which 83 people contribute code and packages. The highlights include:

• Guix now supports aarch64 (64-bit ARM processors). This release does not include a binary installation tarball though, and our build farm does not provide aarch64 substitutes yet. We are looking for aarch64 hardware to address this. Please get in touch with us if you can help!
• Likewise, this release no longer includes a mips64el tarball, though Guix still supports that platform. We do not know whether we will continue to support mips64el in the long run; if you’d like to weigh in, please email us on guix-devel@gnu.org!
• The GuixSD installation image now supports UEFI. GuixSD can also be installed on Btrfs now.
• GuixSD has support to run system services (daemons) in isolated containers as a way to mitigate the harm that can be done by vulnerabilities in those daemons. See this article from April.
• A new guix pack command to create standalone binary bundles is available. We presented it in March.
• Guix now runs on the brand-new 2.2 series of GNU Guile. The transition led to hiccups that we have been addressing, in particular for users of guix pull. Among other things though, the noticeable performance improvement that comes for free is welcome!
• guix publish, which is what we use to distribute binaries, has a new --cache operation mode that improves performance when distributing binaries to a large number of users, as is the case of our build farm.
• Many reproducibility issues found in packages have been addressed—more on that in a future post.
• 840 new packages, leading to a total of 5,400+, and many updates, including glibc 2.25, Linux-libre 4.11, and GCC 7.
• New system services for Redis, Exim, Open vSwitch, and more. The interface of existing services, notably that of the NGINX service, has been greatly improved.
• Many bug fixes!

See the release announcement for details.

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager for the GNU system. The Guix System Distribution or GuixSD is an advanced distribution of the GNU system that relies on GNU Guix and respects the user's freedom.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. Guix uses low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, except that packages are defined as native Guile modules, using extensions to the Scheme language. GuixSD offers a declarative approach to operating system configuration management, and is highly customizable and hackable.

GuixSD can be used on an i686 or x86_64 machine. It is also possible to use Guix on top of an already installed GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el, armv7, and aarch64.