MicroVM Jellyfin

Using MicroVM to deploy a minimal virtual machine of Jellyfin running on NixOS.

Official MicroVM docs

VM Specs:

• NixOS 24.05 Uakari
• 4 vcpu cores
• 4 GB memory
• 256 MB of disk
• Intel iGPU for Quick Sync
• Jellyfin stable
• Intro Skipper

PCI Passthrough

Make sure IOMMU is enabled first.

lspci -nn | grep -Ei "3d|display|vga" to get the vendor_id

Use the vendor_id to match the appropriate PCI device_id

lspci -n | grep vendor_id which returned in my case 00:02.0 0300: 8086:9a49

devices = [ {
      bus = "pci";
      path = "00:02.0";
    }];

Virtual Machine

  microvm = {
    hypervisor = "qemu";
    socket = "control.socket";
    mem = 4 * 1024;
    vcpu = 4;

    interfaces = [ {
      type = "user";
      id = "qemu";
      mac = "02:00:00:01:01:01";
    } ];

    volumes = [{
      mountPoint = "/";
      image = "vm-jellyfin.img";
      size = 256;
    }];

    shares = [{
      proto = "9p";
      tag = "ro-store";
      source = "/nix/store";
      mountPoint = "/nix/.ro-store";
    } {
      proto = "9p";
      tag = "movies";
      source = "/storage/media/movies";
      mountPoint = "/mnt/media/movies";
    } {
      proto = "9p";
      tag = "series";
      source = "/storage/media/series";
      mountPoint = "/mnt/media/series";
    }];

    # Intel iGPU for quick sync
    # devices = [ {
    #   bus = "pci";
    #   path = "00:02.0";
    # } ];
  };

Running

You will need flakes enabled on the system then: nix run .#vm-jellyfin

This will build a 256 MB VM image that shares your hosts nix store in a r/o state which helps drastically reduce image size and build time and the MicroVM docs touch on it here.

There are no passwords set within the VM so your first task should be to login as root and run passwd. You can update the jellyfin user as well with passwd jellyfin

Intro Skipper

Plugins cannot modify contents of files in the nix store so in order to enable Intro Skipper we must modify jellyfin-web. NixOS Jellyfin wiki explains it here.

Enable

Login with admin account navigate to your Dashboard and go to Plugins

Add the repository

• https://manifest.intro-skipper.org/manifest.json

Install Plugin

• Catalog -> Intro Skipper -> Install

You need to restart the Jellyfin service now systemctl restart jellyfin