trynixos
A NixOS small enough to boot in a browser tab. The OS is built and measured; the emulator that will run it here is not finished.
The guest
A BIOS-bootable ISO: one kernel with every driver a virtual machine needs built in and nothing else, a read-only store as a squashfs, and a root shell on the serial console. No login, no network, no nix daemon — the machine is a tab.
| ISO | 59 MiB |
| system closure, unpacked | 239 MiB |
| boot to a prompt, emulated, no KVM | 30 s |
Run it now, locally
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 512 -nographic -nic none \
-accel tcg -cdrom trynixos.iso
-accel tcg on purpose: that is emulation without KVM, the
same way a browser would have to run it. Ctrl-A X quits.
What is missing
The emulator. QEMU compiled to WebAssembly, built from source here rather than taken prebuilt: its five library dependencies are ported and building, QEMU itself is next, then the page that hands this ISO to it. Nothing on this site runs on a server, and nothing here will.