STATELESS CONFIGURATION · TMPFS ROOT · DEV LOWCACHE

Vol[atile] NixOS

A declarative, performance-tuned, ephemeral NixOS workstation built on Nix Flakes and the Lix daemon. The root filesystem is a tmpfs wiped on every boot; all durable state is mapped onto /persist through impermanence. On top sits a CachyOS low-latency kernel, UEFI Secure Boot via Lanzaboote, sops-nix encrypted secrets, isolated microvm.nix network gateways, CUDA-accelerated local AI, and a bespoke Qt6/QML Hyprland desktop shell.

🧬 Ephemeral Root

tmpfs root rebuilt clean each boot; durable state and live dotfiles mapped from /persist. Read more →

🔐 Secure Boot + Secrets

Lanzaboote UEFI Secure Boot and sops-nix + age encrypted secrets. Read more →

🌐 MicroVM Gateways

Isolated cloud-hypervisor guests: a Tor transparent proxy and a Tailscale router. Read more →

🎨 Quickshell Desktop

Hyprland + UWSM with a custom Qt6/QML "illogical-impulse" shell and JSON theme engine. Read more →

🤖 Local AI Stack

CUDA Ollama + Open WebUI, GPU-passthrough Fooocus, and a custom agent toolchain. Read more →

💿 Portable "Limbo"

A generic, hardware-independent profile that installs cleanly on any x86_64 machine. Read more →

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Quick start

# Clone
git clone https://github.com/lowcache/volnixos.git ~/.nix-config
cd ~/.nix-config

# Validate, then build/switch via the canonical Makefile interface
make check          # nix flake check
make build          # build without switching
sudo make switch    # rebuild + switch the live system (HOST=volnix)

Hardware specificity

The volnix host targets a specific machine (AMD Ryzen + hybrid AMD iGPU / NVIDIA RTX 4050, ASUS laptop) and is published as a reference, not a turnkey install. For a clean, generic build on standard x86_64 hardware, use the decoupled limbo profile.

Architecture overview Browse the source