Getting started

In this chapter we will go through the required steps for building nixi, and getting it running in a Virtual Machine. You must install the dependencies used throughout this guide yourself, we are intentionally ambiguous about dependencies, as there is no finite dependency list.

Building nixi

To build nixi from source you will first need to install Rust and Cargo. It’s recommended to install both of these through rustup, read the rustup install guide for more details.

Once Rust and Cargo is installed, you can start by cloning nixi:

git clone https://github.com/proxin187/nixi && cd nixi

You should now be able to run cargo build in the project root. This will place your EFI binary under target/x86_64-unknown-uefi-kernel/debug/nixi.efi.

Running nixi in a Virtual Machine

At the current stage of development nixi only supports UEFI, for this reason the virtual machine setup has a few more hoops then a BIOS setup. Specifically, you will need OVMF in order to run UEFI firmware inside QEMU.