You can now set the store parameter "text-compression=br" to compress
textual files in the binary cache (i.e. narinfo and logs) using
Brotli. This sets the Content-Encoding header; the extension of
compressed files is unchanged.
You can separately specify the compression of log files using
"log-compression=br". This is useful when you don't want to compress
narinfo files for backward compatibility.
This adds support for s3:// URIs in all places where Nix allows URIs,
e.g. in builtins.fetchurl, builtins.fetchTarball, <nix/fetchurl.nix>
and NIX_PATH. It allows fetching resources from private S3 buckets,
using credentials obtained from the standard places (i.e. AWS_*
environment variables, ~/.aws/credentials and the EC2 metadata
server). This may not be super-useful in general, but since we already
depend on aws-sdk-cpp, it's a cheap feature to add.
The fact that queryPathInfo() is synchronous meant that we needed a
thread for every concurrent binary cache lookup, even though they end
up being handled by the same download thread. Requiring hundreds of
threads is not a good idea. So now there is an asynchronous version of
queryPathInfo() that takes a callback function to process the
result. Similarly, enqueueDownload() now takes a callback rather than
returning a future.
Thus, a command like
nix path-info --store https://cache.nixos.org/ -r /nix/store/slljrzwmpygy1daay14kjszsr9xix063-nixos-16.09beta231.dccf8c5
that returns 4941 paths now takes 1.87s using only 2 threads (the main
thread and the downloader thread). (This is with a prewarmed
CloudFront.)
The binary cache store can now use HTTP/2 to do lookups. This is much
more efficient than HTTP/1.1 due to multiplexing: we can issue many
requests in parallel over a single TCP connection. Thus it's no longer
necessary to use a bunch of concurrent TCP connections (25 by
default).
For example, downloading 802 .narinfo files from
https://cache.nixos.org/, using a single TCP connection, takes 11.8s
with HTTP/1.1, but only 0.61s with HTTP/2.
This did require a fairly substantial rewrite of the Downloader class
to use the curl multi interface, because otherwise curl wouldn't be
able to do multiplexing for us. As a bonus, we get connection reuse
even with HTTP/1.1. All downloads are now handled by a single worker
thread. Clients call Downloader::enqueueDownload() to tell the worker
thread to start the download, getting a std::future to the result.
Also, move a few free-standing functions into StoreAPI and Derivation.
Also, introduce a non-nullable smart pointer, ref<T>, which is just a
wrapper around std::shared_ptr ensuring that the pointer is never
null. (For reference-counted values, this is better than passing a
"T&", because the latter doesn't maintain the refcount. Usually, the
caller will have a shared_ptr keeping the value alive, but that's not
always the case, e.g., when passing a reference to a std::thread via
std::bind.)
This makes it consistent with the Nixpkgs fetchurl and makes it work
in chroots. We don't need verification because the hash of the result
is checked anyway.
This ensures that 1) the derivation doesn't change when Nix changes;
2) the derivation closure doesn't contain Nix and its dependencies; 3)
we don't have to rely on ugly chroot hacks.