GNU Shepherd

GNU Guix System or Guix System (previously ''GuixSD'') is a rolling release, free and open source Linux distribution built around the GNU Guix package manager. It enables a declarative operating system configuration and allows reliable system upgrades that can easily be rolled back. It uses the GNU Shepherd init system and the Linux-libre kernel, with support for the GNU Hurd kernel under development. On February 3, 2015, the distribution was added to the Free Software Foundation's list of free Linux distributions. The Guix package manager and the Guix System drew inspiration from the Nix package manager and NixOS respectively.

Architecture support

The following CPU architectures are supported: IA-32, x86-64, ARM7, AArch64, POWER9.

Features

System services

System services are a core feature in Guix System that enable the user to declaratively compose the configuration of daemons and background services and easily specify the relevant configurations.

This enables the user, within a single configuration file, to declare the whole OS (e.g., to have a tor proxy, an sshd server, and a webserver serving guix-web via nginx on a specific port at bootup).

System services can:
* generate files in the filesystem (needed by some applications e.g. files in /etc)
* run any code for setting up daemons
* create specific user and group accounts (e.g. a database user for postgresql)

Ricardo Wurmus, one of the maintainers, explains the extendability as follows:

All the services are defined using Guile Scheme. The list of services continues to grow and as of 1.0.0 includes the following:
* Base Services: Essential system services.
* Scheduled Job Execution: The service.
* Log Rotation: The service.
* Networking Services: Network setup, SSH daemon, etc.
* X Window: Graphical display.
* Printing Services: Local and remote printer support.
* Desktop Services: D-Bus and desktop services.
* Sound Services: ALSA and Pulseaudio services.
* Database Services: SQL databases, key-value stores, etc.
* Mail Services: IMAP, POP3, SMTP, and so forth.
* Messaging Services: Messaging services.
* Telephony Services: Telephony services.
* Monitoring Services: Monitoring services.
* Kerberos Services: Kerberos services.
* LDAP Services: LDAP services.
* Web Services: Web servers.
* Certificate Services: TLS certificates via Let's Encrypt.
* DNS Services: DNS daemons.
* VPN Services: VPN daemons.
* Network File System: NFS related services.
* Continuous Integration: The Cuirass service.
* Power Management Services: Extending battery life.
* Audio Services: The MPD.
* Virtualization Services: Virtualization services.
* Version Control Services: Providing remote access to Git repositories.
* Game Services: Game servers.
* Miscellaneous Services: Other services.

GNU Shepherd init system

The Guix System uses the GNU Daemon Shepherd as its init system, which is developed in tandem with Guix and is written in Guile as well. It was previously known as "dmd", which stood for "Daemon managing Daemons" or "Daemons-managing Daemon", but changed names to avoid collision with the Digital Mars D compiler.

Shepherd supplies user-space functionality asynchronously as services, which under Shepherd are generic functions and object data types that are exported for use by the Shepherd to extend the base operating system in some clearly defined way. In contrast to systemd, a userspace shepherd process runs as the user. Central to the Shepherd model of user space initialization is the concept of the ''extension'', a form of composability whereby services are designed to be layered onto other services, augmenting them with more elaborate or specialised behaviours as desired. This expresses the instantiation-based dependency relationships found in many modern init systems, making the system modular, but also allows services to interact variadically with other services in arbitrary ways, e.g. a service which extends two other services, ''requiring'' only one to be present, but readily extending the second one if it is later instantiated without the need for any further reconfiguration or setup.

Shepherd also provides so-called ''virtual services'' which allow dynamic dispatch over a class of related service objects, such as all those which instantiate a mail transfer agent (MTA) for the system. A system governed via the Shepherd daemon can represent its user space as a directed acyclic graph, with the "system-service," which is responsible for early phases of boot and init, as its root, and all subsequently initialized services as extensions to system-service functionality, either directly or transitively over other services.

Being both written and configured in Guile Scheme, GNU Shepherd is intended to be highly programmable by the system administrator, but it can also be used to manage per-user profiles of unprivileged daemons and services. Its services and configuration are stored uniformly as object-oriented Scheme code, and while a core set of services are provided with the basic Guix System, arbitrary new services can be flexibly declared, and through Guile's object system, GOOPS, existing services can be redefined at the user's discretion by asking the Shepherd to dynamically rewrite services in specified ways on instantiation.

GNU Shepherd was originally designed to work with GNU Hurd, and was later adopted by Guix System.

Release and stability

To date, the Guix System is dependent on unstable git repository development shared with Guix but enables users or organizations to set up stable release channels themselves via the channel-feature.

Updates

Packages in Guix are generally very up-to-date thanks to the lack of a package maintainer bottlenecks. Anyone can contribute an update subject to community approval and the process is assisted by tools such as ''guix refresh''.

Changes to the git repository are peer-reviewed by community members and committed by one of the 45 people with commit access. In practice these builds sometimes cause system breakages for users because of a typo or similar error, but these are often solved within minutes. The way Guix pull operates means users retain a working system in the meantime.

Roll-back

If a system update leaves users with a broken system, users can easily roll back individual packages as well as the whole system state. This means that the kind of stable channel that is very common in other Linux distributions is no longer needed for users who are willing to report a bug and wait a few minutes, when trying to update via ''guix pull''.

Reception

Jesse Smith from DistroWatch Weekly reviewed GNU Guix System 0.15.0 (at the time named GuixSD), and said, "GuixSD has a package manager that I like", but criticized the limited hardware support and its limited documentation. The documentation has since then been expanded and improved with videos and a cookbook in six languages with tutorials, how-to guides and examples.

See also

* GNU Guix
* Debian GNU/Hurd
* Comparison of Linux distributions
* NixOS – A similar operating system, which inspired GNU Guix

References

External links

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List of Guix packages

{{Linux distributions

Guix
Free software only Linux distributions
GNU Project
Free package management systems
Free software programmed in Lisp
Functional programming
GNU Project software
Linux package management-related software
Linux distributions without systemd
Rolling Release Linux distributions
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