Sprint Report
The Aurora Sprint 2026 took place February 23–27 in downtown Reykjavík, Iceland, hosted at Genki's office and made possible through sponsorship from Genki, Determinate Systems, and the NixOS Foundation. Around 20 Nix developers gathered from across the globe — the USA, Canada, Brazil, Finland, the UK, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, New Zealand, and Iceland — with a shared mission: advancing Nix as the ideal platform for building, developing, and testing embedded Linux systems. The sprint was held the week before Planet Nix, and the week kicked off on Sunday evening with burgers and informal hacking, followed by a Monday of introductions, team formation through open discussion, and a relaxing visit to Sundhöllin swimming pool.
The core of the sprint saw an impressive breadth of technical work. Several teams pushed the boundaries of NixOS
on unconventional hardware: NixOS was booted on a Sony Xperia, a Google Pixel 8, an ODROID XU4, and a ClockworkPi
Uconsole with encrypted NVMe — complete with working HDMI, USB, backlight, and Ethernet. On the infrastructure and
tooling side, NixOS initrd secrets were refactored,
hardware-in-the-loop CI testing was added to
buildbot-nix, and the mana and finix projects saw
significant usability improvements. Teams explored
adios as an alternative Nix-based system builder, booting an
nspawn container into systemd with a Nix-built /etc. Other contributions included audio plugin
packaging, a libinput PR to nixpkgs, PKCS#11 YubiKey signing work in robotnix, and experiments with
radicle.xyz and Nix flakes.
Beyond the code, the sprint fostered genuine community and collaboration. Participants shared meals — from BBQs and chickpea wraps at the office to a dinner at Forréttabarinn — explored Reykjavík, soaked in thermal baths at Sky Lagoon, and went aurora hunting. The informal, co-located format proved invaluable: developers who had only known each other online paired up on debugging sessions, reviewed each other's pull requests in real time, and sparked new project ideas like adios-flake. By Friday, the week had produced a remarkable collection of upstream contributions, new tool features, and hardware breakthroughs — a testament to the productivity of in-person sprints and the generous support of sponsors Genki, Determinate Systems, and the NixOS Foundation.
