this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
100 points (89.1% liked)
Technology
59312 readers
4528 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nixos wouldn't have had any issues, it maintains state information based on configuration and you can choose to load an older boot image during bootloader. Other immutable distros it depends on how they work
Nixos still let's discord and steam download their core files independently of the configuration. These get stored in the users home dir but are effectively not part of the immutable promise. I believe that the crowdstrike problem was caused by a file updated in a similar manor. So would have been an issue on any distro. That is one big problem with a driver relying on files outside the package managers control. At least with steam and discord they cannot take your whole system down.
My understanding is the main problem here is that the machines became effectively unbootable. This wouldn't happen in nixos because if setup properly all core system files are handled by nixos itself. That being said obviously it depends on how a user manages their system.
Ideally yes. All core files would be handled by nixos. Except I doubt that is how crowedstrike would work on nixos if it existed on nixos.
Crowedstrikes downloads and manages it own definition file that gets updated multiple times per day. It is this file that was malformed causing the driver to break. This needs to be updated regularly, more then other packages and so would very likely not be something managed by nix package manager but more treated as application data and outside the scope of the nix package manager.
This is how updates to steam and discord are handled in nixos. Only the core updater is packaged and the rest of the application is self managed. So there is a precedence for this behaviour on nixos (although these won't break your system if a bad update happens as the files are in your user dir).