Dualboot instructions from NixOS

[mikenrafter]

I'm unsure if it's possible, but I'd like to be able to dualboot this from my NixOS box easily. This project has the potential to be the most approachable & safe avenue for many to experiment with BSD-based distributions. Including some instructions on how to do this in the README would be much appreciated.

[rhelmot]

I would do some experiments in a VM before committing anything to disk but given that we are doing EFI boot, it should be pretty painless. I don't think that our bootloader has or ever will have the ability to boot other operating systems, but it should work just fine as an EFI target for other bootloaders or even your firmware's picker.

I'll see about doing some experiments and putting instructions in the README soon :)

[artemist]

Installing is interesting now because we currently only have the tools to make a VM image with boots with UEFI. We don't currently build a BIOS bootloader or support installing stand-efi to locations other than bootx64.efi

It is possible to install on real hardware, but it's a fairly manual process. You have to:

• build the extra.systemImage output, which contains a qcow2 image
• convert the qcow2 image to raw with qemu-img
• Write the raw image to a flash drive
• Boot a machine from the flash drive
• Manually partition the drive with gpart
• Format the rootfs ane UEFI partition (I haven't tested zfs, UFS works at least)
• Create a hardware-configuration.nix (we don't have nixos-generage-config so it should be something like mine)
• Do the normal nixos-install process from there

We should document this, but I'd like a somewhat less manual process before putting it so front-and-center