Install NixOS with root on ZFS

Introduction I had some fun migrating my NixOS servers to root on ZFS a while ago but did not take the time to write about it. This was mostly for fun and consistency with my other setups because thanks to Nix, the operating system itself does not benefit that much from being on ZFS. You can (almost) always revert to a previous working state right from the boot loader entries, but ZFS still adds its usual benefits for all the other parts: snapshots you can send remotely, zvols, native encryption, native compression. Bootstrap the NixOS installer on a local virtual machine Create the RAW hard drive image for your virtual machine. Using the minimal necessary size will speed up later image transfer if it needs uploading to some VPS or cloud provider. At the time of this writing, a minimal system seems to fit in about 4GB, but feel free to use a bigger image if you do not intend to transfer it later. qemu-img create -f raw nixos.raw 4G Download the installer image from an official mirror…