# February 2021 round-up

DevFeed: [February 2021 round-up](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/february-2021-round-up-32471.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://mobile.nixos.org/news/2021-03-02-february-2021-round-up.html>)

Author: Samuel Dionne-Riel

Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00Z

Content type: news

Language: en

Sources: [Mobile NixOS news](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/mobile-nixos-news.md>)

Topics: [Nix](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/nix.md>), [Mobile](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/mobile.md>), [Cross-Compilation](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cross-compilation.md>), [pull-requests](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pull-requests.md>), [Android](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/android.md>), [boot](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/boot.md>)

Tags: [android](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/android.md>), [boot](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/boot.md>), [cross-compilation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cross-compilation.md>), [flashing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/flashing.md>), [pull-requests](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/pull-requests.md>), [update](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/update.md>), [zip](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/zip.md>)

## AI overview

This fifteenth Mobile NixOS project update reports 18 merged pull requests and describes more hermetic evaluation without NIX_PATH, completed stage-0 boot features, restored armv7 support, and Android flashable ZIP support.

## Source excerpt

This update is the fifteenth in a series of regular updates on the state of the project. Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There's always more work currently in-progress. Notable changes During the month 18 pull requests were merged. Compared to the last month, they're more subtle changes. More hermetic evaluation This started off the work from @eamsden, where uses of <nixpkgs> were removed almost everywhere in #238. With the changes, the value <nixpkgs> is now used only at one location, at the start of the evaluation, in a way that can be overridden easily if needed. This means that evaluation now works fine without a NIX_PATH. This is useful to allow users of Nix flakes to use the project. Similar changes were made in #310 to rely on a single <nixpkgs> value for release.nix and example configuration evaluations. Finalize stage-0 When #262 was merged in December, it was done so with two main features missing. Time was taken to finish the boot features for stage-0 in #300. When a device supports stage-0 boot, a new toggle is shown in the generations list allowing the user to skip rebooting into the generation's kernel. When booting a generation, the device tree built from the same kernel source tree is now used. The pull request itself contains technical details. This was less trivial than expected. armv7 works again Using armv7 with Nixpkgs or NixOS is not always easy. There is no binary cache, and cross-compilation is as YMMV as it is for AArch64. This is the reason why armv7 Mobile NixOS devices haven't seen much work done and things slowly started not working. With #306 time was taken to ensure contributors with armv7 devices wouldn't be left with hard to debug issues from Mobile NixOS itself. With this work finally taken care of, there is a recent known good starting point to use for armv7 devices. A few recent WIP device ports were made on top of these changes. Stay tuned as they may become supported devices a