The flag remembering whether an Interrupted exception was thrown is
now thread-local. Thus, all threads will (eventually) throw
Interrupted. Previously, one thread would throw Interrupted, and then
the other threads wouldn't see that they were supposed to quit.
Unlike "nix-store --verify-path", this command verifies signatures in
addition to store path contents, is multi-threaded (especially useful
when verifying binary caches), and has a progress indicator.
Example use:
$ nix verify-paths --store https://cache.nixos.org -r $(type -p thunderbird)
...
[17/132 checked] checking ‘/nix/store/rawakphadqrqxr6zri2rmnxh03gqkrl3-autogen-5.18.6’
Doing a chdir() is a bad idea in multi-threaded programs, leading to
failures such as
error: cannot connect to daemon at ‘/nix/var/nix/daemon-socket/socket’: No such file or directory
Since Linux doesn't have a connectat() syscall like FreeBSD, there is
no way we can support this in a race-free way.
This enables an optimisation in hydra-queue-runner, preventing a
download of a NAR it just uploaded to the cache when reading files
like hydra-build-products.
This enables an optimisation in hydra-queue-runner, preventing a
download of a NAR it just uploaded to the cache when reading files
like hydra-build-products.
For example,
$ NIX_REMOTE=file:///my-cache nix ls-store -lR /nix/store/f4kbgl8shhyy76rkk3nbxr0lz8d2ip7q-binutils-2.23.1
dr-xr-xr-x 0 ./bin
-r-xr-xr-x 30748 ./bin/addr2line
-r-xr-xr-x 66973 ./bin/ar
...
Similarly, "nix ls-nar" lists the contents of a NAR file, "nix
cat-nar" extracts a file from a NAR file, and "nix cat-store" extract
a file from a Nix store.
This allows a RemoteStore object to be used safely from multiple
threads concurrently. It will make multiple daemon connections if
necessary.
Note: pool.hh and sync.hh have been copied from the Hydra source tree.
This is currently only used by the Hydra queue runner rework, but like
eff5021eaa it presumably will be useful
for the C++ rewrite of nix-push and
download-from-binary-cache. (@shlevy)
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.)
For example,
$ nix-build --hash -A nix-repl.src
will build the fixed-output derivation nix-repl.src (a fetchFromGitHub
call), but instead of *verifying* the hash given in the Nix
expression, it prints out the resulting hash, and then moves the
result to its content-addressed location in the Nix store. E.g
build produced path ‘/nix/store/504a4k6zi69dq0yjc0bm12pa65bccxam-nix-repl-8a2f5f0607540ffe56b56d52db544373e1efb980-src’ with sha256 hash ‘0cjablz01i0g9smnavhf86imwx1f9mnh5flax75i615ml71gsr88’
The goal of this is to make all nix-prefetch-* scripts unnecessary: we
can just let Nix run the real thing (i.e., the corresponding fetch*
derivation).
Another example:
$ nix-build --hash -E 'with import <nixpkgs> {}; fetchgit { url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nix.git"; sha256 = "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"; }'
...
git revision is 9e7c1a4bbd
...
build produced path ‘/nix/store/gmsnh9i7x4mb7pyd2ns7n3c9l90jfsi1-nix’ with sha256 hash ‘1188xb621diw89n25rifqg9lxnzpz7nj5bfh4i1y3dnis0dmc0zp’
(Having to specify a fake sha256 hash is a bit annoying...)
Previously files in the Nix store were owned by root or by nixbld,
depending on whether they were created by a substituter or by a
builder. This doesn't matter much, but causes spurious diffoscope
differences. So use root everywhere.
E.g.
$ nix-build pkgs/stdenv/linux/ -A stage1.pkgs.perl --check
nix-store: src/libstore/build.cc:1323: void nix::DerivationGoal::tryToBuild(): Assertion `buildMode != bmCheck || validPaths.size() == drv->outputs.size()' failed.
when perl.out exists but perl.man doesn't. The fix is to only check
the outputs that exist. Note that "nix-build -A stage1.pkgs.all
--check" will still give a (proper) error in this case.
This was observed in the deb_debian7x86_64 build:
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/29973215
Calling c_str() on a temporary should be fine because the temporary
shouldn't be destroyed until after the execl() call, but who knows...
If repair found a corrupted/missing path that depended on a
multiple-output derivation, and some of the outputs of the latter were
not present, it failed with a message like
error: path ‘/nix/store/cnfn9d5fjys1y93cz9shld2xwaibd7nn-bash-4.3-p42-doc’ is not valid
Also show types when nix cannot compare values of different types.
This is also more consistent since types are already shown when comparing values of the same not comparable type.
For example, "${{ foo = "bar"; __toString = x: x.foo; }}" evaluates
to "bar".
With this, we can delay calling functions like mkDerivation,
buildPythonPackage, etc. until we actually need a derivation, enabling
overrides and other modifications to happen by simple attribute set
update.
This makes Darwin consistent with Linux: Nix expressions can't break
out of the sandbox unless relaxed sandbox mode is enabled.
For the normal sandbox mode this will require fixing #759 however.
Otherwise, since the call to write a "d" character to the lock file
can fail with ENOSPC, we can get an unhandled exception resulting in a
call to terminate().
Caused by 8063fc497a. If tmpDir !=
tmpDirInSandbox (typically when there are multiple concurrent builds
with the same name), the *Path attribute would not point to an
existing file. This caused Nixpkgs' writeTextFile to write an empty
file. In particular this showed up as hanging VM builds (because it
would run an empty run-nixos-vm script and then wait for it to finish
booting).
This is arguably nitpicky, but I think this new formulation is even
clearer. My thinking is that it's easier to comprehend when the
calculated hash value is displayed close to the output path. (I think it
is somewhat similar to eliminating double negatives in logic
statements.)
The formulation is inspired / copied from the OpenEmbedded build tool,
bitbake.
Rather than using $<host-TMPDIR>/nix-build-<drvname>-<number>, the
temporary directory is now always /tmp/nix-build-<drvname>-0. This
improves bitwise-exact reproducibility for builds that store $TMPDIR
in their build output. (Of course, those should still be fixed...)
edolstra:
“…since callers of readDirectory have to handle the possibility of
DT_UNKNOWN anyway, and we don't want to do a stat call for every
directory entry unless it's really needed.”
The nixpkgs manual prescribes the use of values from stdenv.lib.licenses
for the meta.license attribute. Those values are attribute sets and
currently skipped when running nix-env with '--xml --meta'. This has the
consequence that also nixpkgs-lint will report missing licenses.
With this commit nix-env with '--xml --meta' will print all attributes
of an attribute set that are of type tString. For example the output for
the package nixpkgs.hello is
<meta name="license" type="strings">
<string type="url" value="http://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0+" />
<string type="shortName" value="gpl3Plus" />
<string type="fullName" value="GNU General Public License v3.0 or later" />
<string type="spdxId" value="GPL-3.0+" />
</meta>
This commit fixes nixpkgs-lint, too.
Temporarily allow derivations to describe their full sandbox profile.
This will be eventually scaled back to a more secure setup, see the
discussion at #695
Nix reports a hash mismatch saying:
output path ‘foo’ should have sha256 hash ‘abc’, instead has ‘xyz’
That message is slightly ambiguous and some people read that statement
to mean the exact opposite of what it is supposed to mean. After this
patch, the message will be:
Nix expects output path ‘foo’ to have sha256 hash ‘abc’, instead it has ‘xyz’
- rename options but leav old names as lower-priority aliases,
also "-dirs" -> "-paths" to get closer to the meaning
- update docs to reflect the new names (old aliases are not documented),
including a new file with release notes
- tests need an update after corresponding changes to nixpkgs
- __noChroot is left as it is (after discussion on the PR)
Passing "--option build-repeat <N>" will cause every build to be
repeated N times. If the build output differs between any round, the
build is rejected, and the output paths are not registered as
valid. This is primarily useful to verify build determinism. (We
already had a --check option to repeat a previously succeeded
build. However, with --check, non-deterministic builds are registered
in the DB. Preventing that is useful for Hydra to ensure that
non-deterministic builds don't end up getting published at all.)
This reverts commit 79ca503332. Ouch,
never noticed this. We definitely don't want to allow builds to have
arbitrary access to /bin and /usr/bin, because then they can (for
instance) bring in a bunch of setuid programs. Also, we shouldn't be
encouraging the use of impurities in the default configuration.
If automatic store optimisation is enabled, and a hard-linked file in
the store gets corrupted, then the corresponding .links entry will
also be corrupted. In that case, trying to repair with --repair or
--repair-path won't work, because the new "good" file will be replaced
by a hard link to the corrupted file. We can catch most of these cases
by doing a sanity-check on the file sizes.
> I made this change for two reasons:
> 1. Darwin's locale data doesn't appear to be open source
> 2. Privileged processes will always use /usr/share/locale regardless of environment variables
This removes the need to have multiple downloads in the stdenv
bootstrap process (like a separate busybox binary for Linux, or
curl/mkdir/sh/bzip2 for Darwin). Now all those files can be combined
into a single NAR.
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.
The stack allocated for the builder was way too small (32 KB). This is
sufficient for normal derivations, because they just do some setup and
then exec() the actual builder. But for the fetchurl builtin
derivation it's not enough. Also, allocating the stack on the caller's
stack was fishy business.
This allows overriding the name component of the resulting Nix store
path, which is necessary if the base name of the URI contains
"illegal" characters.
This is in particular useful for fetchFromGitHub et al., ensuring that
the store path produced by nix-prefetch-url corresponds to what those
functions expect.
This allows nix-prefetch-url to prefetch the output of fetchzip and
its wrappers (like fetchFromGitHub). For example:
$ nix-prefetch-url --unpack https://github.com/NixOS/patchelf/archive/0.8.tar.gz
or from a Nix expression:
$ nix-prefetch-url -A nix-repl.src
In the latter case, --unpack can be omitted because nix-repl.src is a
fetchFromGitHub derivation and thus has "outputHashMode" set to
"recursive".
Some evidence that defining it to be 0 is right:
* OS X headers define it to be 0.
* Other code uses 0 instead of SOL_LOCAL to check for peer credentials
(e.g. FreeBSD's implementation of getpeereid).
Previously, pkg-config was already queried for libsqlite3's and
libcurl's link flags. However they were not used, but hardcoded
instead. This commit replaces the hardcoded LDFLAGS by the ones
provided by pkg-config in a similar pattern as already used for
libsodium.
For example,
$ nix-prefetch-url -A hello.src
will prefetch the file specified by the fetchurl call in the attribute
‘hello.src’ from the Nix expression in the current directory. This
differs from ‘nix-build -A hello.src’ in that it doesn't verify the
hash.
You can also specify a path to the Nix expression:
$ nix-prefetch-url ~/Dev/nixpkgs -A hello.src
List elements (typically used in ‘patches’ attributes) also work:
$ nix-prefetch-url -A portmidi.patches.0
It was strange to show "upgrading" when the version was getting lower.
This is left on "upgrading" when the versions are the same,
as I can't see any better wording.
Until now, if one explicitly installed a low-priority version,
nix-env --upgrade would downgrade it by default and even with --leq.
Let's never accept an upgrade with version not matching the upgradeType.
Additionally, let's never decrease the priority of an installed package;
you can use --install to force that.
Also refactor to use variable bestVersion instead of bestName,
as only version was used from it.
Fixes https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/9504.
Note that this means we may have a non-functional /bin/sh in the
chroot while rebuilding Bash or one of its dependencies. Ideally those
packages don't rely on /bin/sh though.
The value pointers of lists with 1 or 2 elements are now stored in the
list value itself. In particular, this makes the "concatMap (x: if
cond then [(f x)] else [])" idiom cheaper.
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.
In particular, hydra-queue-runner can now distinguish between remote
build / substitution / already-valid. For instance, if a path already
existed on the remote side, we don't want to store a log file.
Previously, to build a derivation remotely, we had to copy the entire
closure of the .drv file to the remote machine, even though we only
need the top-level derivation. This is very wasteful: the closure can
contain thousands of store paths, and in some Hydra use cases, include
source paths that are very large (e.g. Git/Mercurial checkouts).
So now there is a new operation, StoreAPI::buildDerivation(), that
performs a build from an in-memory representation of a derivation
(BasicDerivation) rather than from a on-disk .drv file. The only files
that need to be in the Nix store are the sources of the derivation
(drv.inputSrcs), and the needed output paths of the dependencies (as
described by drv.inputDrvs). "nix-store --serve" exposes this
interface.
Note that this is a privileged operation, because you can construct a
derivation that builds any store path whatsoever. Fixing this will
require changing the hashing scheme (i.e., the output paths should be
computed from the other fields in BasicDerivation, allowing them to be
verified without access to other derivations). However, this would be
quite nice because it would allow .drv-free building (e.g. "nix-env
-i" wouldn't have to write any .drv files to disk).
Fixes#173.
This modification moves Attr and Bindings structures into their own header
file which is dedicated to the attribute set representation. The goal of to
isolate pieces of code which are related to the attribute set
representation. Thus future modifications of the attribute set
representation will only have to modify these files, and not every other
file across the evaluator.
The following patch is an attempt to address this bug (see
<http://bugs.gnu.org/18994>) by preserving the supplementary groups of
build users in the build environment.
In practice, I would expect that supplementary groups would contain only
one or two groups: the build users group, and possibly the “kvm” group.
[Changed &at(0) to data() and removed tabs - Eelco]
Not substituting builds with "preferLocalBuild = true" was a bad idea,
because it didn't take the cost of dependencies into account. For
instance, if we can't substitute a fetchgit call, then we have to
download/build git and all its dependencies.
Partially reverts 5558652709 and adds a
new derivation attribute "allowSubstitutes" to specify whether a
derivation may be substituted.
Nixpkgs' writeTextAsFile does this:
mv "$textPath" "$n"
Since $textPath was owned by root, if $textPath is on the same
filesystem as $n, $n will be owned as root. As a result, the build
result was rejected as having suspicious ownership.
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/22836807
Hello!
The patch below adds a ‘verifyStore’ RPC with the same signature as the
current LocalStore::verifyStore method.
Thanks,
Ludo’.
>From aef46c03ca77eb6344f4892672eb6d9d06432041 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: =?UTF-8?q?Ludovic=20Court=C3=A8s?= <ludo@gnu.org>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2015 23:17:10 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] Add a 'verifyStore' remote procedure call.
This relaxes restricted mode to allow access to anything in the
store. In the future, it would be better to allow access to only paths
that have been constructed in the current evaluation (so a hard-coded
/nix/store/blabla in a Nix expression would still be
rejected). However, note that reading /nix/store itself is still
rejected, so you can't use this so get access to things you don't know
about.
The call to nix-env expects a string which represents how old the
derivations are or just "old" which means any generations other than
the current one in use. Currently nix-collect-garbage passes an empty
string to nix-env when using the -d option. This patch corrects the call
to nix-env such that it follows the old behavior.
This hook can be used to set system-specific per-derivation build
settings that don't fit into the derivation model and are too complex or
volatile to be hard-coded into nix. Currently, the pre-build hook can
only add chroot dirs/files through the interface, but it also has full
access to the chroot root.
The specific use case for this is systems where the operating system ABI
is more complex than just the kernel-support system calls. For example,
on OS X there is a set of system-provided frameworks that can reliably
be accessed by any program linked to them, no matter the version the
program is running on. Unfortunately, those frameworks do not
necessarily live in the same locations on each version of OS X, nor do
their dependencies, and thus nix needs to know the specific version of
OS X currently running in order to make those frameworks available. The
pre-build hook is a perfect mechanism for doing just that.
This hook can be used to set system specific per-derivation build
settings that don't fit into the derivation model and are too complex or
volatile to be hard-coded into nix. Currently, the pre-build hook can
only add chroot dirs/files.
The specific use case for this is systems where the operating system ABI
is more complex than just the kernel-supported system calls. For
example, on OS X there is a set of system-provided frameworks that can
reliably be accessed by any program linked to them, no matter the
version the program is running on. Unfortunately, those frameworks do
not necessarily live in the same locations on each version of OS X, nor
do their dependencies, and thus nix needs to know the specific version
of OS X currently running in order to make those frameworks available.
The pre-build hook is a perfect mechanism for doing just that.
This is because we don't want to do HTTP requests on every evaluation,
even though we can prevent a full redownload via the cached ETag. The
default is one hour.
This was causing NixOS VM tests to fail mysteriously since
5ce50cd99e. Nscd could (sometimes) no
longer read /etc/hosts:
open("/etc/hosts", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
Probably there was some wacky interaction between the guest kernel and
the 9pfs implementation in QEMU.
This function downloads and unpacks the given URL at evaluation
time. This is primarily intended to make it easier to deal with Nix
expressions that have external dependencies. For instance, to fetch
Nixpkgs 14.12:
with import (fetchTarball https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels/archive/nixos-14.12.tar.gz) {};
Or to fetch a specific revision:
with import (fetchTarball 2766a4b44e.tar.gz) {};
This patch also adds a ‘fetchurl’ builtin that downloads but doesn't
unpack its argument. Not sure if it's useful though.
Thus, for example, to get /bin/sh in a chroot, you only need to
specify /bin/sh=${pkgs.bash}/bin/sh in build-chroot-dirs. The
dependencies of sh will be added automatically.
This doesn't work anymore if the "strict" chroot mode is
enabled. Instead, add Nix's store path as a dependency. This ensures
that its closure is present in the chroot.
I'm seeing hangs in Glibc's setxid_mark_thread() again. This is
probably because the use of an intermediate process to make clone()
safe from a multi-threaded program (see
524f89f139) is defeated by the use of
vfork(), since the intermediate process will have a copy of Glibc's
threading data structures due to the vfork(). So use a regular fork()
again.
If ‘build-use-chroot’ is set to ‘true’, fixed-output derivations are
now also chrooted. However, unlike normal derivations, they don't get
a private network namespace, so they can still access the
network. Also, the use of the ‘__noChroot’ derivation attribute is
no longer allowed.
Setting ‘build-use-chroot’ to ‘relaxed’ gives the old behaviour.
If ‘--option restrict-eval true’ is given, the evaluator will throw an
exception if an attempt is made to access any file outside of the Nix
search path. This is primarily intended for Hydra, where we don't want
people doing ‘builtins.readFile ~/.ssh/id_dsa’ or stuff like that.
chroot only changes the process root directory, not the mount namespace root
directory, and it is well-known that any process with chroot capability can
break out of a chroot "jail". By using pivot_root as well, and unmounting the
original mount namespace root directory, breaking out becomes impossible.
Non-root processes typically have no ability to use chroot() anyway, but they
can gain that capability through the use of clone() or unshare(). For security
reasons, these syscalls are limited in functionality when used inside a normal
chroot environment. Using pivot_root() this way does allow those syscalls to be
put to their full use.
Sodium's Ed25519 signatures are much shorter than OpenSSL's RSA
signatures. Public keys are also much shorter, so they're now
specified directly in the nix.conf option ‘binary-cache-public-keys’.
The new command ‘nix-store --generate-binary-cache-key’ generates and
prints a public and secret key.
The DT_UNKNOWN fallback code was getting the type of the wrong path,
causing readDir to report "directory" as the type of every file.
Reported by deepfire on IRC.
I.e., not readable to the nixbld group. This improves purity a bit for
non-chroot builds, because it prevents a builder from enumerating
store paths (i.e. it can only access paths it knows about).
Let's not just improve the error message itself, but also the behaviour
to actually work around the ntfs-3g symlink bug. If the readlink() call
returns a smaller size than the stat() call, this really isn't a problem
even if the symlink target really has changed between the calls.
So if stat() reports the size for the absolute path, it's most likely
that the relative path is smaller and thus it should also work for file
system bugs as mentioned in 93002d69fc58c2b71e2dfad202139230c630c53a.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
Tested-by: John Ericson <Ericson2314@Yahoo.com>
A message like "error: reading symbolic link `...' : Success" really is
quite confusing, so let's not indicate "success" but rather point out
the real issue.
We could also limit the check of this to just check for non-negative
values, but this would introduce a race condition between stat() and
readlink() if the link target changes between those two calls, thus
leading to a buffer overflow vulnerability.
Reported by @Ericson2314 on IRC. Happened due to a possible ntfs-3g bug
where a relative symlink returned the absolute path (st_)size in stat()
while readlink() returned the relative size.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
Tested-by: John Ericson <Ericson2314@Yahoo.com>
In low memory environments, "nix-env -qa" failed because the fork to
run the pager hit the kernel's overcommit limits. Using posix_spawn
gets around this. (Actually, you have to use posix_spawn with the
undocumented POSIX_SPAWN_USEVFORK flag, otherwise it just uses
fork/exec...)
Code that links to libnixexpr (e.g. plugins loaded with importNative, or
nix-exec) may want to provide custom value types and operations on
values of those types. For example, nix-exec is currently using sets
where a custom IO value type would be more appropriate. This commit
provides a generic hook for such types in the form of tExternal and the
ExternalBase virtual class, which contains all functions necessary for
libnixexpr's type-polymorphic functions (e.g. `showType`) to be
implemented.
The function ‘builtins.match’ takes a POSIX extended regular
expression and an arbitrary string. It returns ‘null’ if the string
does not match the regular expression. Otherwise, it returns a list
containing substring matches corresponding to parenthesis groups in
the regex. The regex must match the entire string (i.e. there is an
implied "^<pat>$" around the regex). For example:
match "foo" "foobar" => null
match "foo" "foo" => []
match "f(o+)(.*)" "foooobar" => ["oooo" "bar"]
match "(.*/)?([^/]*)" "/dir/file.nix" => ["/dir/" "file.nix"]
match "(.*/)?([^/]*)" "file.nix" => [null "file.nix"]
The following example finds all regular files with extension .nix or
.patch underneath the current directory:
let
findFiles = pat: dir: concatLists (mapAttrsToList (name: type:
if type == "directory" then
findFiles pat (dir + "/" + name)
else if type == "regular" && match pat name != null then
[(dir + "/" + name)]
else []) (readDir dir));
in findFiles ".*\\.(nix|patch)" (toString ./.)
Before this there was a bug where a `find` was being called on a
not-yet-sorted set. The code was just a mess before anyway, so I cleaned
it up while fixing it.
Especially in WAL mode on a highly loaded machine, this is not a good
idea because it results in a WAL file of approximately the same size
ad the database, which apparently cannot be deleted while anybody is
accessing it.
This was preventing destructors from running. In particular, it was
preventing the deletion of the temproot file for each worker
process. It may also have been responsible for the excessive WAL
growth on Hydra (due to the SQLite database not being closed
properly).
Apparently broken by accident in
8e9140cfde.
With this, attribute sets with a `__functor` attribute can be applied
just like normal functions. This can be used to attach arbitrary
metadata to a function without callers needing to treat it specially.
In particular, gcc 4.6's std::exception::~exception has an exception
specification in c++0x mode, which requires us to use that deprecated
feature in nix (and led to breakage after some recent changes that were
valid c++11).
nix already uses several c++11 features and gcc 4.7 has been around for
over 2 years.
Clearing v.app.right was not enough, because the length field of a
list only takes 32 bits, so the most significant 32 bits of v.app.left
(a.k.a. v.thunk.env) would remain. This could cause Boehm GC to
interpret it as a valid pointer.
This change reduces maximum RSS for evaluating the ‘tested’ job in
nixos/release-small.nix from 1.33 GiB to 0.80 GiB, and runtime by
about 8%.
For the "stdenv accidentally referring to bootstrap-tools", it seems
easier to specify the path that we don't want to depend on, e.g.
disallowedRequisites = [ bootstrapTools ];
It turns out that using clone() to start a child process is unsafe in
a multithreaded program. It can cause the initialisation of a build
child process to hang in setgroups(), as seen several times in the
build farm:
The reason is that Glibc thinks that the other threads of the parent
exist in the child, so in setxid_mark_thread() it tries to get a futex
that has been acquired by another thread just before the clone(). With
fork(), Glibc runs pthread_atfork() handlers that take care of this
(in particular, __reclaim_stacks()). But clone() doesn't do that.
Fortunately, we can use fork()+unshare() instead of clone() to set up
private namespaces.
See also https://www.mail-archive.com/lxc-devel@lists.linuxcontainers.org/msg03434.html.
The Nixpkgs stdenv prints some custom escape sequences to denote
nesting and stuff like that. Most terminals (e.g. xterm, konsole)
ignore them, but some do not (e.g. xfce4-terminal). So for the benefit
of the latter, filter them out.
If a root is a regular file, then its name must denote a store
path. For instance, the existence of the file
/nix/var/nix/gcroots/per-user/eelco/hydra-roots/wzc3cy1wwwd6d0dgxpa77ijr1yp50s6v-libxml2-2.7.7
would cause
/nix/store/wzc3cy1wwwd6d0dgxpa77ijr1yp50s6v-libxml2-2.7.7
to be a root.
This is useful because it involves less I/O (no need for a readlink()
call) and takes up less disk space (the symlink target typically takes
up a full disk block, while directory entries are packed more
efficiently). This is particularly important for hydra.nixos.org,
which has hundreds of thousands of roots, and where reading the roots
can take 25 minutes.
Other operations cannot hang indefinitely (except when we're reading
from stdin, in which case we'll notice a client disconnect). But
monitoring works badly during compressed imports, since there the
client can close the connection before we've sent an ack.
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/12711638
Signal handlers are process-wide, so sending SIGINT to the monitor
thread will cause the normal SIGINT handler to run. This sets the
isInterrupted flag, which is not what we want. So use pthread_cancel
instead.
This is necessary because build-remote.pl now builds via ‘nix-store
--serve’. So if a build hangs without writing to stdout/stderr, and
the client disconnects, then we need to detect that.
The thread calls poll() to wait until a HUP (or other error event)
happens on the client connection. If so, it sends SIGINT to the main
thread, which is then cleaned up normally. This is much nicer than
messing around with SIGPOLL.
‘trusted-users’ is a list of users and groups that have elevated
rights, such as the ability to specify binary caches. It defaults to
‘root’. A typical value would be ‘@wheel’ to specify all users in the
wheel group.
‘allowed-users’ is a list of users and groups that are allowed to
connect to the daemon. It defaults to ‘*’. A typical value would be
‘@users’ to specify the ‘users’ group.
When running NixOps under Mac OS X, we need to be able to import store
paths built on Linux into the local Nix store. However, HFS+ is
usually case-insensitive, so if there are directories with file names
that differ only in case, then importing will fail.
The solution is to add a suffix ("~nix~case~hack~<integer>") to
colliding files. For instance, if we have a directory containing
xt_CONNMARK.h and xt_connmark.h, then the latter will be renamed to
"xt_connmark.h~nix~case~hack~1". If a store path is dumped as a NAR,
the suffixes are removed. Thus, importing and exporting via a
case-insensitive Nix store is round-tripping. So when NixOps calls
nix-copy-closure to copy the path to a Linux machine, you get the
original file names back.
Closes#119.
This makes things more efficient (we don't need to use an SSH master
connection, and we only start a single remote process) and gets rid of
locking issues (the remote nix-store process will keep inputs and
outputs locked as long as they're needed).
It also makes it more or less secure to connect directly to the root
account on the build machine, using a forced command
(e.g. ‘command="nix-store --serve --write"’). This bypasses the Nix
daemon and is therefore more efficient.
Also, don't call nix-store to import the output paths.
There is a long-standing race condition when copying a closure to a
remote machine, particularly affecting build-remote.pl: the client
first asks the remote machine which paths it already has, then copies
over the missing paths. If the garbage collector kicks in on the
remote machine between the first and second step, the already-present
paths may be deleted. The missing paths may then refer to deleted
paths, causing nix-copy-closure to fail. The client now performs both
steps using a single remote Nix call (using ‘nix-store --serve’),
locking all paths in the closure while querying.
I changed the --serve protocol a bit (getting rid of QueryCommand), so
this breaks the SSH substituter from older versions. But it was marked
experimental anyway.
Fixes#141.
This can be used to import a dynamic shared object and return an
arbitrary value, including new primops. This can be used both to test
new primops without having to recompile nix every time, and to build
specialized primops that probably don't belong upstream (e.g. a function
that calls out to gpg to decrypt a nixops secret as-needed).
The imported function should initialize the Value & as needed. A single
import can define multiple values by creating an attrset or list, of
course.
An example initialization function might look like:
extern "C" void initialize(nix::EvalState & state, nix::Value & v)
{
v.type = nix::tPrimOp;
v.primOp = NEW nix::PrimOp(myFun, 1, state.symbols.create("myFun"));
}
Then `builtins.importNative ./example.so "initialize"` will evaluate to
the primop defined in the myFun function.
When copying a large path causes the daemon to run out of memory, you
now get:
error: Nix daemon out of memory
instead of:
error: writing to file: Broken pipe
It's slower than ExprVar since it doesn't compute a static
displacement. Since we're not using the throw primop in the
implementation of <...> anymore, it's also not really needed.
Nix search path lookups like <nixpkgs> are now desugared to ‘findFile
nixPath <nixpkgs>’, where ‘findFile’ is a new primop. Thus you can
override the search path simply by saying
let
nixPath = [ { prefix = "nixpkgs"; path = "/my-nixpkgs"; } ];
in ... <nixpkgs> ...
In conjunction with ‘scopedImport’ (commit
c273c15cb1), the Nix search path can be
propagated across imports, e.g.
let
overrides = {
nixPath = [ ... ] ++ builtins.nixPath;
import = fn: scopedImport overrides fn;
scopedImport = attrs: fn: scopedImport (overrides // attrs) fn;
builtins = builtins // overrides;
};
in scopedImport overrides ./nixos
‘scopedImport’ works like ‘import’, except that it takes a set of
attributes to be added to the lexical scope of the expression,
essentially extending or overriding the builtin variables. For
instance, the expression
scopedImport { x = 1; } ./foo.nix
where foo.nix contains ‘x’, will evaluate to 1.
This has a few applications:
* It allows getting rid of function argument specifications in package
expressions. For instance, a package expression like:
{ stdenv, fetchurl, libfoo }:
stdenv.mkDerivation { ... buildInputs = [ libfoo ]; }
can now we written as just
stdenv.mkDerivation { ... buildInputs = [ libfoo ]; }
and imported in all-packages.nix as:
bar = scopedImport pkgs ./bar.nix;
So whereas we once had dependencies listed in three places
(buildInputs, the function, and the call site), they now only need
to appear in one place.
* It allows overriding builtin functions. For instance, to trace all
calls to ‘map’:
let
overrides = {
map = f: xs: builtins.trace "map called!" (map f xs);
# Ensure that our override gets propagated by calls to
# import/scopedImport.
import = fn: scopedImport overrides fn;
scopedImport = attrs: fn: scopedImport (overrides // attrs) fn;
# Also update ‘builtins’.
builtins = builtins // overrides;
};
in scopedImport overrides ./bla.nix
* Similarly, it allows extending the set of builtin functions. For
instance, during Nixpkgs/NixOS evaluation, the Nixpkgs library
functions could be added to the default scope.
There is a downside: calls to scopedImport are not memoized, unlike
import. So importing a file multiple times leads to multiple parsings
/ evaluations. It would be possible to construct the AST only once,
but that would require careful handling of variables/environments.
If a build log is not available locally, then ‘nix-store -l’ will now
try to download it from the servers listed in the ‘log-servers’ option
in nix.conf. For instance, if you have:
log-servers = http://hydra.nixos.org/log
then it will try to get logs from http://hydra.nixos.org/log/<base
name of the store path>. So you can do things like:
$ nix-store -l $(which xterm)
and get a log even if xterm wasn't built locally.
By preloading all inodes in the /nix/store/.links directory, we can
quickly determine of a hardlinked file was already linked to the hashed
links.
This is tolerant of removing the .links directory, it will simply
recalculate all hashes in the store.
If an inode in the Nix store has more than 1 link, it probably means that it was linked into .links/ by us. If so, skip.
There's a possibility that something else hardlinked the file, so it would be nice to be able to override this.
Also, by looking at the number of hardlinks for each of the files in .links/, you can get deduplication numbers and space savings.
The option '--delete-generations Nd' deletes all generations older than N
days. However, most likely the user does not want to delete the
generation that was active N days ago.
For example, say that you have these 3 generations:
1: <30 days ago>
2: <15 days ago>
3: <1 hour ago>
If you do --delete-generations 7d (say, as part of a cron job), most
likely you still want to keep generation 2, i.e. the generation that was
active 7 days ago (and for most of the past 7 days, in fact).
This patch fixes this issue. Note that this also affects
'nix-collect-garbage --delete-older-than Nd'.
Thanks to @roconnor for noticing the issue!
This allows error messages like:
error: the anonymous function at `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix:1:1'
called without required argument `foo', at
`/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixpkgs/lib/modules.nix:77:59'
While running Python 3’s test suite, we noticed that on some systems
/dev/pts/ptmx is created with permissions 0 (that’s the case with my
Nixpkgs-originating 3.0.43 kernel, but someone with a Debian-originating
3.10-3 reported not having this problem.)
There’s still the problem that people without
CONFIG_DEVPTS_MULTIPLE_INSTANCES=y are screwed (as noted in build.cc),
but I don’t see how we could work around it.
Since the addition of build-max-log-size, a call to
handleChildOutput() can result in cancellation of a goal. This
invalidated the "j" iterator in the waitForInput() loop, even though
it was still used afterwards. Likewise for the maxSilentTime
handling.
Probably fixes#231. At least it gets rid of the valgrind warnings.
Ludo reported this error:
unexpected Nix daemon error: boost::too_few_args: format-string refered to more arguments than were passed
coming from this line:
printMsg(lvlError, run.program + ": " + string(err, 0, p));
The problem here is that the string ends up implicitly converted to a
Boost format() object, so % characters are treated specially. I
always assumed (wrongly) that strings are converted to a format object
that outputs the string as-is.
Since this assumption appears in several places that may be hard to
grep for, I've added some C++ type hackery to ensures that the right
thing happens. So you don't have to worry about % in statements like
printMsg(lvlError, "foo: " + s);
or
throw Error("foo: " + s);
The daemon now creates /dev deterministically (thanks!). However, it
expects /dev/kvm to be present.
The patch below restricts that requirement (1) to Linux-based systems,
and (2) to systems where /dev/kvm already exists.
I’m not sure about the way to handle (2). We could special-case
/dev/kvm and create it (instead of bind-mounting it) in the chroot, so
it’s always available; however, it wouldn’t help much since most likely,
if /dev/kvm missing, then KVM support is missing.
Currently, clients cannot recover from an isValidPath RPC with an
invalid path parameter because the daemon closes the connection when
that happens.
More precisely:
1. in performOp, wopIsValidPath case, ‘readStorePath’ raises an
‘Error’ exception;
2. that exception is caught by the handler in ‘processConnection’;
3. the handler determines errorAllowed == false, and thus exits after
sending the message.
This last part is fixed by calling ‘startWork’ early on, as in the patch
below.
The same reasoning could be applied to all the RPCs that take one or
more store paths as inputs, but isValidPath is, by definition, likely to
be passed invalid paths in the first place, so it’s important for this
one to allow recovery.
Since the meta attributes were not sorted, attribute lookup could
fail, leading to package priorities and active flags not working
correctly.
Broken since 0f24400d90.
If we're evaluating some application ‘v = f x’, we can't store ‘f’
temporarily in ‘v’, because if ‘f x’ refers to ‘v’, it will get ‘f’
rather than an infinite recursion error.
Unfortunately, this breaks the tail call optimisation introduced in
c897bac549.
Fixes#217.
We were relying on SubstitutionGoal's destructor releasing the lock,
but if a goal is a top-level goal, the destructor won't run in a
timely manner since its reference count won't drop to zero. So
release it explicitly.
Fixes#178.
Fixes#121. Note that we don't warn about missing $NIX_PATH entries
because it's intended that some may be missing (cf. the default
$NIX_PATH on NixOS, which includes paths like /etc/nixos/nixpkgs for
backward compatibility).
The flag ‘--check’ to ‘nix-store -r’ or ‘nix-build’ will cause Nix to
redo the build of a derivation whose output paths are already valid.
If the new output differs from the original output, an error is
printed. This makes it easier to test if a build is deterministic.
(Obviously this cannot catch all sources of non-determinism, but it
catches the most common one, namely the current time.)
For example:
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A patchelf
...
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A patchelf --check
error: derivation `/nix/store/1ipvxsdnbhl1rw6siz6x92s7sc8nwkkb-patchelf-0.6' may not be deterministic: hash mismatch in output `/nix/store/4pc1dmw5xkwmc6q3gdc9i5nbjl4dkjpp-patchelf-0.6.drv'
The --check build fails if not all outputs are valid. Thus the first
call to nix-build is necessary to ensure that all outputs are valid.
The current outputs are left untouched: the new outputs are either put
in a chroot or diverted to a different location in the store using
hash rewriting.
This substituter connects to a remote host, runs nix-store --serve
there, and then forwards substituter commands on to the remote host and
sends their results to the calling program. The ssh-substituter-hosts
option can be specified as a list of hosts to try.
This is an initial implementation and, while it works, it has some
limitations:
* Only the first host is used
* There is no caching of query results (all queries are sent to the
remote machine)
* There is no informative output (such as progress bars)
* Some failure modes may cause unhelpful error messages
* There is no concept of trusted-ssh-substituter-hosts
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
nix-store --export takes a tmproot, which can only release by exiting.
Substituters don't currently work in a way that could take advantage of
the looping, anyway.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
This is essentially the substituter API operating on the local store,
which will be used by the ssh substituter. It runs in a loop rather than
just taking one command so that in the future nix will be able to keep
one connection open for multiple instances of the substituter.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
This allows running nix-instantiate --eval-only without performing the
evaluation in readonly mode, letting features like import from
derivation and automatic substitution of builtins.storePath paths work.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
Namely:
nix-store: derivations.cc:242: nix::Hash nix::hashDerivationModulo(nix::StoreAPI&, nix::Derivation): Assertion `store.isValidPath(i->first)' failed.
This happened because of the derivation output correctness check being
applied before the references of a derivation are valid.
Now, in addition to a."${b}".c, you can write a.${b}.c (applicable
wherever dynamic attributes are valid).
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*
So since commit 22144afa8d, Nix hasn't
actually checked whether the content of a downloaded NAR matches the
hash specified in the manifest / NAR info file. Urghhh...
This doesn't change any functionality but moves some behavior out of the
parser and into the evaluator in order to simplify the code.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
Since addAttr has to iterate through the AttrPath we pass it, it makes
more sense to just iterate through the AttrNames in addAttr instead. As
an added bonus, this allows attrsets where two dynamic attribute paths
have the same static leading part (see added test case for an example
that failed previously).
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
This adds new syntax for attribute names:
* attrs."${name}" => getAttr name attrs
* attrs ? "${name}" => isAttrs attrs && hasAttr attrs name
* attrs."${name}" or def => if attrs ? "${name}" then attrs."${name}" else def
* { "${name}" = value; } => listToAttrs [{ inherit name value; }]
Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that. The attribute chains
can be arbitrarily long and contain combinations of static and dynamic
parts (e.g. attrs."${foo}".bar."${baz}" or qux), which is relatively
straightforward for the getAttrs/hasAttrs cases but is more complex for
the listToAttrs case due to rules about duplicate attribute definitions.
For attribute sets with dynamic attribute names, duplicate static
attributes are detected at parse time while duplicate dynamic attributes
are detected when the attribute set is forced. So, for example, { a =
null; a.b = null; "${"c"}" = true; } will be a parse-time error, while
{ a = {}; "${"a"}".b = null; c = true; } will be an eval-time error
(technically that case could theoretically be detected at parse time,
but the general case would require full evaluation). Moreover, duplicate
dynamic attributes are not allowed even in cases where they would be
with static attributes ({ a.b.d = true; a.b.c = false; } is legal, but {
a."${"b"}".d = true; a."${"b"}".c = false; } is not). This restriction
might be relaxed in the future in cases where the static variant would
not be an error, but it is not obvious that that is desirable.
Finally, recursive attribute sets with dynamic attributes have the
static attributes in scope but not the dynamic ones. So rec { a = true;
"${"b"}" = a; } is equivalent to { a = true; b = true; } but rec {
"${"a"}" = true; b = a; } would be an error or use a from the
surrounding scope if it exists.
Note that the getAttr, getAttr or default, and hasAttr are all
implemented purely in the parser as syntactic sugar, while attribute
sets with dynamic attribute names required changes to the AST to be
implemented cleanly.
This is an alternative solution to and closes#167
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
Certain desugaring schemes may require the parser to use some builtin
function to do some of the work (e.g. currently `throw` is used to
lazily cause an error if a `<>`-style path is not in the search path)
Unfortunately, these names are not reserved keywords, so an expression
that uses such a syntactic sugar will not see the expected behavior
(see tests/lang/eval-okay-redefine-builtin.nix for an example).
This adds the ExprBuiltin AST type, which when evaluated uses the value
from the rootmost variable scope (which of course is initialized
internally and can't shadow any of the builtins).
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
This will allow e.g. channel expressions to use builtins.storePath IFF
it is safe to do so without knowing if the path is valid yet.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
In particular "libutil" was always a problem because it collides with
Glibc's libutil. Even if we install into $(libdir)/nix, the linker
sometimes got confused (e.g. if a program links against libstore but
not libutil, then ld would report undefined symbols in libstore
because it was looking at Glibc's libutil).
This is requires if you have attribute names with dots in them. So
you can now say:
$ nix-instantiate '<nixos>' -A 'config.systemd.units."postgresql.service".text' --eval-only
Fixes#151.
Note that adding --show-trace prevents functions calls from being
tail-recursive, so an expression that evaluates without --show-trace
may fail with a stack overflow if --show-trace is given.
It kept temporary data in STL containers that were not scanned by
Boehm GC, so Nix programs using genericClosure could randomly crash if
the garbage collector kicked in at a bad time.
Also make it a bit more efficient by copying points to values rather
than values.
We already have some primops for determining the type of a value, such
as isString, but they're incomplete: for instance, there is no isPath.
Rather than adding more isBla functions, the generic typeOf function
returns a string representing the type of the argument (e.g. "int").
I.e. "nix-store -q --roots" will now show (for example)
/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/result
rather than
/nix/var/nix/gcroots/auto/53222qsppi12s2hkap8dm2lg8xhhyk6v
Combined with the previous changes, stack traces involving derivations
are now much less verbose, since something like
while evaluating the builtin function `getAttr':
while evaluating the builtin function `derivationStrict':
while instantiating the derivation named `gtk+-2.24.20' at `/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/development/libraries/gtk+/2.x.nix:11:3':
while evaluating the derivation attribute `propagatedNativeBuildInputs' at `/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/default.nix:78:17':
while evaluating the attribute `outPath' at `/nix/store/212ngf4ph63mp6p1np2bapkfikpakfv7-nix-1.6/share/nix/corepkgs/derivation.nix:18:9':
...
now reads
while evaluating the attribute `propagatedNativeBuildInputs' of the derivation `gtk+-2.24.20' at `/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/development/libraries/gtk+/2.x.nix:11:3':
...
Messages like
while evaluating the attribute `outPath' at `/nix/store/212ngf4ph63mp6p1np2bapkfikpakfv7-nix-1.6/share/nix/corepkgs/derivation.nix:18:9':
are redundant, because Nix already shows that it's evaluating a derivation:
while instantiating the derivation named `firefox-24.0' at `/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/networking/browsers/firefox/default.nix:131:5':
while evaluating the derivation attribute `nativeBuildInputs' at `/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/default.nix:76:17':
Commit 159e621d1a accidentally changed
the behaviour of antiquoted paths, e.g.
"${/foo}/bar"
used to evaluate to "/nix/store/<hash>-foo/bar" (where /foo gets
copied to the store), but in Nix 1.6 it evaluates to "/foo/bar". This
is inconsistent, since
" ${/foo}/bar"
evaluates to " /nix/store/<hash>-foo/bar". So revert to the old
behaviour.
There is no risk of getting an inconsistent result here: if the ID
returned by queryValidPathId() is deleted from the database
concurrently, subsequent queries involving that ID will simply fail
(since IDs are never reused).
In the Hydra build farm we fairly regularly get SQLITE_PROTOCOL errors
(e.g., "querying path in database: locking protocol"). The docs for
this error code say that it "is returned if some other process is
messing with file locks and has violated the file locking protocol
that SQLite uses on its rollback journal files." However, the SQLite
source code reveals that this error can also occur under high load:
if( cnt>5 ){
int nDelay = 1; /* Pause time in microseconds */
if( cnt>100 ){
VVA_ONLY( pWal->lockError = 1; )
return SQLITE_PROTOCOL;
}
if( cnt>=10 ) nDelay = (cnt-9)*238; /* Max delay 21ms. Total delay 996ms */
sqlite3OsSleep(pWal->pVfs, nDelay);
}
i.e. if certain locks cannot be not acquired, SQLite will retry a
number of times before giving up and returing SQLITE_PROTOCOL. The
comments say:
Circumstances that cause a RETRY should only last for the briefest
instances of time. No I/O or other system calls are done while the
locks are held, so the locks should not be held for very long. But
if we are unlucky, another process that is holding a lock might get
paged out or take a page-fault that is time-consuming to resolve,
during the few nanoseconds that it is holding the lock. In that case,
it might take longer than normal for the lock to free.
...
The total delay time before giving up is less than 1 second.
On a heavily loaded machine like lucifer (the main Hydra server),
which often has dozens of processes waiting for I/O, it seems to me
that a page fault could easily take more than a second to resolve.
So, let's treat SQLITE_PROTOCOL as SQLITE_BUSY and retry the
transaction.
Issue NixOS/hydra#14.
Previously, a undefined variable inside a "with" caused an EvalError
(which can be caught), while outside, it caused a ParseError (which
cannot be caught). Now both cause an UndefinedVarError (which cannot
be caught).
Since they don't have location information, they just give you crap
like:
while evaluating the builtin function `getAttr':
while evaluating the builtin function `derivationStrict':
...
If a "with" attribute set fails to evaluate, we have to make sure its
Env record remains unchanged. Otherwise, repeated evaluation gives a
segfault:
nix-repl> :a with 0; { a = x; b = x; }
Added 2 variables.
nix-repl> a
error: value is an integer while an attribute set was expected
nix-repl> b
Segmentation fault
As discovered by Todd Veldhuizen, the shell started by nix-shell has
its affinity set to a single CPU. This is because nix-shell connects
to the Nix daemon, which causes the affinity hack to be applied. So
we turn this off for Perl programs.
This is equivalent to running ‘nix-env -e '*'’ first, except that it
happens in a single transaction. Thus, ‘nix-env -i pkgs...’ replaces
the profile with the specified set of packages.
The main motivation is to support declarative package management
(similar to environment.systemPackages in NixOS). That is, if you
have a specification ‘profile.nix’ like this:
with import <nixpkgs> {};
[ thunderbird
geeqie
...
]
then after any change to ‘profile.nix’, you can run:
$ nix-env -f profile.nix -ir
to update the profile to match the specification. (Without the ‘-r’
flag, if you remove a package from ‘profile.nix’, it won't be removed
from the actual profile.)
Suggested by @zefhemel.
This prevents some duplicate evaluation in nix-env and
nix-instantiate.
Also, when traversing ~/.nix-defexpr, only read regular files with the
extension .nix. Previously it was reading files like
.../channels/binary-caches/<name>. The only reason this didn't cause
problems is pure luck (namely, <name> shadows an actual Nix
expression, the binary-caches files happen to be syntactically valid
Nix expressions, and we iterate over the directory contents in just
the right order).
Since we already cache files in normal form (fileEvalCache), caching
parse trees is redundant.
Note that getting rid of this cache doesn't actually save much memory
at the moment, because parse trees are currently not freed / GC'ed.
This reduces the difference between inherited and non-inherited
attribute handling to the choice of which env to use (in recs and lets)
by setting the AttrDef::e to a new ExprVar in the parser rather than
carrying a separate AttrDef::v VarRef member.
As an added bonus, this allows inherited attributes that inherit from a
with to delay forcing evaluation of the with's attributes.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
On Linux, Nix can build i686 packages even on x86_64 systems. It's not
enough to recognize this situation by settings.thisSystem, we also have
to consult uname(). E.g. we can be running on a i686 Debian with an
amd64 kernel. In that situation settings.thisSystem is i686-linux, but
we still need to change personality to i686 to make builds consistent.
On a system with multiple CPUs, running Nix operations through the
daemon is significantly slower than "direct" mode:
$ NIX_REMOTE= nix-instantiate '<nixos>' -A system
real 0m0.974s
user 0m0.875s
sys 0m0.088s
$ NIX_REMOTE=daemon nix-instantiate '<nixos>' -A system
real 0m2.118s
user 0m1.463s
sys 0m0.218s
The main reason seems to be that the client and the worker get moved
to a different CPU after every call to the worker. This patch adds a
hack to lock them to the same CPU. With this, the overhead of going
through the daemon is very small:
$ NIX_REMOTE=daemon nix-instantiate '<nixos>' -A system
real 0m1.074s
user 0m0.809s
sys 0m0.098s
Commit 20866a7031 added a ‘withAttrs’
field to Env, which is annoying because it makes every Env structure
bigger and we allocate millions of them. E.g. NixOS evaluation took
18 MiB more. So this commit squeezes ‘withAttrs’ into values[0].
Probably should use a union...
Evaluation of attribute sets is strict in the attribute names, which
means immediate evaluation of `with` attribute sets rules out some
potentially interesting use cases (e.g. where the attribute names of one
set depend in some way on another but we want to bring those names into
scope for some values in the second set).
The major example of this is overridable self-referential package sets
(e.g. all-packages.nix). With immediate `with` evaluation, the only
options for such sets are to either make them non-recursive and
explicitly use the name of the overridden set in non-overridden one
every time you want to reference another package, or make the set
recursive and use the `__overrides` hack. As shown in the test case that
comes with this commit, though, delayed `with` evaluation allows a nicer
third alternative.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
Previously, if the Nix evaluator gets a stack overflow due to a deep
or infinite recursion in the Nix expression, the user gets an
unhelpful message ("Segmentation fault") that doesn't indicate that
the problem is in the user's code rather than Nix itself. Now it
prints:
error: stack overflow (possible infinite recursion)
This only works on x86_64-linux and i686-linux.
Fixes#35.
The kill(2) in Apple's libc follows POSIX semantics, which means that
kill(-1, SIGKILL) will kill the calling process too. Since nix has no
way to distinguish between the process successfully killing everything
and the process being killed by a rogue builder in that case, it can't
safely conclude that killUser was successful.
Luckily, the actual kill syscall takes a parameter that determines
whether POSIX semantics are followed, so we can call that syscall
directly and avoid the issue on Apple.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
This reverts commit 69b8f9980f.
The timeout should be enforced remotely. Otherwise, if the garbage
collector is running either locally or remotely, if will block the
build or closure copying for some time. If the garbage collector
takes too long, the build may time out, which is not what we want.
Also, on heavily loaded systems, copying large paths to and from the
remote machine can take a long time, also potentially resulting in a
timeout.
mount(2) with MS_BIND allows mounting a regular file on top of a regular
file, so there's no reason to only bind directories. This allows finer
control over just which files are and aren't included in the chroot
without having to build symlink trees or the like.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
With C++ std::map, doing a comparison like ‘map["foo"] == ...’ has the
side-effect of adding a mapping from "foo" to the empty string if
"foo" doesn't exist in the map. So we ended up setting some
environment variables by accident.
In particular this means that "trivial" derivations such as writeText
are not substituted, reducing the number of GET requests to the binary
cache by about 200 on a typical NixOS configuration.
This substituter basically cannot work reliably since we switched to
SQLite, since SQLite databases may need write access to open them even
just for reading (and in WAL mode they always do).
For instance, it's pointless to keep copy-from-other-stores running if
there are no other stores, or download-using-manifests if there are no
manifests. This also speeds things up because we don't send queries
to those substituters.
Before calling dumpPath(), we have to make sure the files are owned by
the build user. Otherwise, the build could contain a hard link to
(say) /etc/shadow, which would then be read by the daemon and
rewritten as a world-readable file.
This only affects systems that don't have hard link restrictions
enabled.
The assertion in canonicalisePathMetaData() failed because the
ownership of the path already changed due to the hash rewriting. The
solution is not to check the ownership of rewritten paths.
Issue #122.
Otherwise subsequent invocations of "--repair" will keep rebuilding
the path. This only happens if the path content differs between
builds (e.g. due to timestamps).
Functions in Nix are anonymous, but if they're assigned to a
variable/attribute, we can use the variable/attribute name in error
messages, e.g.
while evaluating `concatMapStrings' at `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixpkgs/pkgs/lib/strings.nix:18:25':
...
Don't pass --timeout / --max-silent-time to the remote builder.
Instead, let the local Nix process terminate the build if it exceeds a
timeout. The remote builder will be killed as a side-effect. This
gives better error reporting (since the timeout message from the
remote side wasn't properly propagated) and handles non-Nix problems
like SSH hangs.
I'm not sure if it has ever worked correctly. The line "lastWait =
after;" seems to mean that the timer was reset every time a build
produced log output.
Note that the timeout is now per build, as documented ("the maximum
number of seconds that a builder can run").
It is surprisingly impossible to check if a mountpoint is a bind mount
on Linux, and in my previous commit I forgot to check if /nix/store was
even a mountpoint at all. statvfs.f_flag is not populated with MS_BIND
(and even if it were, my check was wrong in the previous commit).
Luckily, the semantics of mount with MS_REMOUNT | MS_BIND make both
checks unnecessary: if /nix/store is not a mountpoint, then mount will
fail with EINVAL, and if /nix/store is not a bind-mount, then it will
not be made writable. Thus, if /nix/store is not a mountpoint, we fail
immediately (since we don't know how to make it writable), and if
/nix/store IS a mountpoint but not a bind-mount, we fail at first write
(see below for why we can't check and fail immediately).
Note that, due to what is IMO buggy behavior in Linux, calling mount
with MS_REMOUNT | MS_BIND on a non-bind readonly mount makes the
mountpoint appear writable in two places: In the sixth (but not the
10th!) column of mountinfo, and in the f_flags member of struct statfs.
All other syscalls behave as if the mount point were still readonly (at
least for Linux 3.9-rc1, but I don't think this has changed recently or
is expected to soon). My preferred semantics would be for MS_REMOUNT |
MS_BIND to fail on a non-bind mount, as it doesn't make sense to remount
a non bind-mount as a bind mount.
/nix/store could be a read-only bind mount even if it is / in its own filesystem, so checking the 4th field in mountinfo is insufficient.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
It turns out that in multi-user Nix, a builder may be able to do
ln /etc/shadow $out/foo
Afterwards, canonicalisePathMetaData() will be applied to $out/foo,
causing /etc/shadow's mode to be set to 444 (readable by everybody but
writable by nobody). That's obviously Very Bad.
Fortunately, this fails in NixOS's default configuration because
/nix/store is a bind mount, so "ln" will fail with "Invalid
cross-device link". It also fails if hard-link restrictions are
enabled, so a workaround is:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/fs/protected_hardlinks
The solution is to check that all files in $out are owned by the build
user. This means that innocuous operations like "ln
${pkgs.foo}/some-file $out/" are now rejected, but that already failed
in chroot builds anyway.
Wacky string coercion semantics caused expressions like
exec = "${./my-script} params...";
to evaluate to a path (‘/path/my-script params’), because
anti-quotations are desuged to string concatenation:
exec = ./my-script + " params...";
By constrast, adding a space at the start would yield a string as
expected:
exec = " ${./my-script} params...";
Now the first example also evaluates to a string.
...where <XX> is the first two characters of the derivation.
Otherwise /nix/var/log/nix/drvs may become so large that we run into
all sorts of weird filesystem limits/inefficiences. For instance,
ext3/ext4 filesystems will barf with "ext4_dx_add_entry:1551:
Directory index full!" once you hit a few million files.
So if a path is not garbage solely because it's reachable from a root
due to the gc-keep-outputs or gc-keep-derivations settings, ‘nix-store
-q --roots’ now shows that root.
But this time it's *obviously* correct! No more segfaults due to
infinite recursions for sure, etc.
Also, move directories to /nix/store/trash instead of renaming them to
/nix/store/bla-gc-<pid>. Then we can just delete /nix/store/trash at
the end.
This prevents zillions of derivations from being kept, and fixes an
infinite recursion in the garbage collector (due to an obscure cycle
that can occur with fixed-output derivations).
We now print all output paths of a package, e.g.
openssl-1.0.0i bin=/nix/store/gq2mvh0wb9l90djvsagln3aqywqmr6vl-openssl-1.0.0i-bin;man=/nix/store/7zwf5r5hsdarl3n86dasvb4chm2xzw9n-openssl-1.0.0i-man;/nix/store/cj7xvk7fjp9q887359j75pw3pzjfmqf1-openssl-1.0.0i
or (in XML mode)
<item attrPath="openssl" name="openssl-1.0.0i" system="x86_64-linux">
<output name="bin" path="/nix/store/gq2mvh0wb9l90djvsagln3aqywqmr6vl-openssl-1.0.0i-bin" />
<output name="man" path="/nix/store/7zwf5r5hsdarl3n86dasvb4chm2xzw9n-openssl-1.0.0i-man" />
<output name="out" path="/nix/store/cj7xvk7fjp9q887359j75pw3pzjfmqf1-openssl-1.0.0i" />
</item>
This allows adding attributes like
attr = if stdenv.system == "bla" then something else null;
without changing the resulting derivation on non-<bla> platforms.
We once considered adding a special "ignore" value for this purpose,
but using null seems more elegant.
The integer constant ‘langVersion’ denotes the current language
version. It gets increased every time a language feature is
added/changed/removed. It's currently 1.
The string constant ‘nixVersion’ contains the current Nix version,
e.g. "1.2pre2980_9de6bc5".
If a derivation has multiple outputs, then we only want to download
those outputs that are actuallty needed. So if we do "nix-build -A
openssl.man", then only the "man" output should be downloaded.
Likewise if another package depends on ${openssl.man}.
The tricky part is that different derivations can depend on different
outputs of a given derivation, so we may need to restart the
corresponding derivation goal if that happens.
For example, given a derivation with outputs "out", "man" and "bin":
$ nix-build -A pkg
produces ./result pointing to the "out" output;
$ nix-build -A pkg.man
produces ./result-man pointing to the "man" output;
$ nix-build -A pkg.all
produces ./result, ./result-man and ./result-bin;
$ nix-build -A pkg.all -A pkg2
produces ./result, ./result-man, ./result-bin and ./result-2.
This flag causes paths that do not have a known substitute to be
quietly ignored. This is mostly useful for Charon, allowing it to
speed up deployment by letting a machine use substitutes for all
substitutable paths, instead of uploading them. The latter is
frequently faster, e.g. if the target machine has a fast Internet
connection while the source machine is on a slow ADSL line.
This reverts commit 2980d1fba9. It
causes a regression in NixOS evaluation:
string `/nix/store/ya3s5gmj3b28170fpbjhgsk8wzymkpa1-pommed-1.39/etc/pommed.conf' cannot refer to other paths
vfork() is just too weird. For instance, in this build:
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/3330487
the value fromHook.writeSide becomes corrupted in the parent, even
though the child only reads from it. At -O0 the problem goes away.
Probably the child is overriding some spilled temporary variable.
If I get bored I may implement using posix_spawn() instead.
I.e. do what git does. I'm too lazy to keep the builtin help text up
to date :-)
Also add ‘--help’ to various commands that lacked it
(e.g. nix-collect-garbage).
With this flag, if any valid derivation output is missing or corrupt,
it will be recreated by using a substitute if available, or by
rebuilding the derivation. The latter may use hash rewriting if
chroots are not available.
This operation allows fixing corrupted or accidentally deleted store
paths by redownloading them using substituters, if available.
Since the corrupted path cannot be replaced atomically, there is a
very small time window (one system call) during which neither the old
(corrupted) nor the new (repaired) contents are available. So
repairing should be used with some care on critical packages like
Glibc.
In Nixpkgs, the attribute in all-packages.nix corresponding to a
package is usually equal to the package name. However, this doesn't
work if the package contains a dash, which is fairly common. The
convention is to replace the dash with an underscore (e.g. "dbus-lib"
becomes "dbus_glib"), but that's annoying. So now dashes are valid in
variable / attribute names, allowing you to write:
dbus-glib = callPackage ../development/libraries/dbus-glib { };
and
buildInputs = [ dbus-glib ];
Since we don't have a negation or subtraction operation in Nix, this
is unambiguous.
Using the immutable bit is problematic, especially in conjunction with
store optimisation. For instance, if the garbage collector deletes a
file, it has to clear its immutable bit, but if the file has
additional hard links, we can't set the bit afterwards because we
don't know the remaining paths.
So now that we support having the entire Nix store as a read-only
mount, we may as well drop the immutable bit. Unfortunately, we have
to keep the code to clear the immutable bit for backwards
compatibility.
It turns out that the immutable bit doesn't work all that well. A
better way is to make the entire Nix store a read-only bind mount,
i.e. by doing
$ mount --bind /nix/store /nix/store
$ mount -o remount,ro,bind /nix/store
(This would typically done in an early boot script, before anything
from /nix/store is used.)
Since Nix needs to be able to write to the Nix store, it now detects
if /nix/store is a read-only bind mount and then makes it writable in
a private mount namespace.
The outputs of a derivation can refer to each other (even though they
cannot have cycles), so they have to be deleted in the right order.
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/3026118
If the options gc-keep-outputs and gc-keep-derivations are both
enabled, you can get a cycle in the liveness graph. There was a hack
to handle this, but it didn't work with multiple-output derivations,
causing the garbage collector to fail with errors like ‘error: cannot
delete path `...' because it is in use by `...'’. The garbage
collector now handles strongly connected components in the liveness
graph as a unit and decides whether to delete all or none of the paths
in an SCC.
Note that this will only work if the client has a very recent Nix
version (post 15e1b2c223), otherwise the
--option flag will just be ignored.
Fixes#50.
This handles the chroot and build hook cases, which are easy.
Supporting the non-chroot-build case will require more work (hash
rewriting!).
Issue #21.
"config.h" must be included first, because otherwise the compiler
might not see the right value of _FILE_OFFSET_BITS. We've had this
before; see 705868a8a9. In this case,
GCC would compute a different address for ‘settings.useSubstitutes’ in
misc.cc because of the off_t in ‘settings’.
Reverts 3854fc9b42.
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/3016700
Output names are now appended to resulting GC symlinks, e.g. by
nix-build. For backwards compatibility, if the output is named "out",
nothing is appended. E.g. doing "nix-build -A foo" on a derivation
that produces outputs "out", "bin" and "dev" will produce symlinks
"./result", "./result-bin" and "./result-dev", respectively.
This is required on systemd, which mounts filesystems as "shared"
subtrees. Changes to shared trees in a private mount namespace are
propagated to the outside world, which is bad.
More precisely, in concatLists, if all lists except one are empty,
then just return the non-empty list. This reduces the number of list
element allocations by 32% when evaluating a NixOS system
configuration.
This can serve as a generic efficient list builder. For instance, the
function ‘catAttrs’ in Nixpkgs can be rewritten from
attr: l: fold (s: l: if hasAttr attr s then [(getAttr attr s)] ++ l else l) [] l
to
attr: l: builtins.concatLists (map (s: if hasAttr attr s then [(getAttr attr s)] else []) l)
Statistics before:
time elapsed: 1.08683
size of a value: 24
environments allocated: 1384376 (35809568 bytes)
list elements: 6946783 (55574264 bytes)
list concatenations: 37434
values allocated: 1760440 (42250560 bytes)
attribute sets allocated: 392040
right-biased unions: 186334
values copied in right-biased unions: 591137
symbols in symbol table: 18273
number of thunks: 1297673
number of thunks avoided: 1380759
number of attr lookups: 430802
number of primop calls: 628912
number of function calls: 1333544
Statistics after (including new catAttrs):
time elapsed: 0.959854
size of a value: 24
environments allocated: 1010198 (26829296 bytes)
list elements: 1984878 (15879024 bytes)
list concatenations: 30488
values allocated: 1589760 (38154240 bytes)
attribute sets allocated: 392040
right-biased unions: 186334
values copied in right-biased unions: 591137
symbols in symbol table: 18274
number of thunks: 1040925
number of thunks avoided: 1038428
number of attr lookups: 438419
number of primop calls: 474844
number of function calls: 959366
The one in Nixpkgs is O(n^2), this one is O(n). Big reduction in the
number of list allocations.
Statistics before (on a NixOS system config):
time elapsed: 1.17982
size of a value: 24
environments allocated: 1543334 (39624560 bytes)
list elements: 9612638 (76901104 bytes)
list concatenations: 37434
values allocated: 1854933 (44518392 bytes)
attribute sets allocated: 392040
right-biased unions: 186334
values copied in right-biased unions: 591137
symbols in symbol table: 18272
number of thunks: 1392467
number of thunks avoided: 1507311
number of attr lookups: 430801
number of primop calls: 691600
number of function calls: 1492502
Statistics after:
time elapsed: 1.08683
size of a value: 24
environments allocated: 1384376 (35809568 bytes)
list elements: 6946783 (55574264 bytes)
list concatenations: 37434
values allocated: 1760440 (42250560 bytes)
attribute sets allocated: 392040
right-biased unions: 186334
values copied in right-biased unions: 591137
symbols in symbol table: 18273
number of thunks: 1297673
number of thunks avoided: 1380759
number of attr lookups: 430802
number of primop calls: 628912
number of function calls: 1333544
Evaluation of a NixOS configuration spends quite a lot of time in the
"filter" function in Nixpkgs. As implemented in Nixpkgs, this is a
O(n^2) operation, so it's a good candidate for providing a more
efficient (i.e. primop) implementation. Using it gives a ~10% speed
increase and a significant reduction in the number of evaluations.
Statistics before (on a NixOS system config):
time elapsed: 1.3258
size of a value: 24
environments allocated: 1980939 (50127080 bytes)
list elements: 14679308 (117434464 bytes)
list concatenations: 50828
values allocated: 2098938 (50374512 bytes)
attribute sets allocated: 392040
right-biased unions: 186334
values copied in right-biased unions: 591137
symbols in symbol table: 18271
number of thunks: 1645752
number of thunks avoided: 1921196
number of attr lookups: 430798
number of primop calls: 838807
number of function calls: 1930107
Statistics after:
time elapsed: 1.17982
size of a value: 24
environments allocated: 1543334 (39624560 bytes)
list elements: 9612638 (76901104 bytes)
list concatenations: 37434
values allocated: 1854933 (44518392 bytes)
attribute sets allocated: 392040
right-biased unions: 186334
values copied in right-biased unions: 591137
symbols in symbol table: 18272
number of thunks: 1392467
number of thunks avoided: 1507311
number of attr lookups: 430801
number of primop calls: 691600
number of function calls: 1492502
Setting the environment variable NIX_COUNT_CALLS to 1 enables some
basic profiling in the evaluator. It will count calls to functions
and primops as well as evaluations of attributes.
For example, to see where evaluation of a NixOS configuration spends
its time:
$ NIX_SHOW_STATS=1 NIX_COUNT_CALLS=1 ./src/nix-instantiate/nix-instantiate '<nixos>' -A system --readonly-mode
...
calls to 39 primops:
239532 head
233962 tail
191252 hasAttr
...
calls to 1595 functions:
224157 `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixpkgs/pkgs/lib/lists.nix:17:19'
221767 `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixpkgs/pkgs/lib/lists.nix:17:14'
221767 `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixpkgs/pkgs/lib/lists.nix:17:10'
...
evaluations of 7088 attributes:
167377 undefined position
132459 `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixpkgs/pkgs/lib/attrsets.nix:119:41'
47322 `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixpkgs/pkgs/lib/attrsets.nix:13:21'
...
This is a problem because one process may set the immutable bit before
the second process has created its link.
Addressed random Hydra failures such as:
error: cannot rename `/nix/store/.tmp-link-17397-1804289383' to
`/nix/store/rsvzm574rlfip3830ac7kmaa028bzl6h-nixos-0.1pre-git/upstart-interface-version':
Operation not permitted
Channels are implemented using a profile now, and profiles contain a
manifest.nix file. This should be ignored to prevent bogus packages
from showing up in nix-env.
Since SubstitutionGoal::finished() in build.cc computes the hash
anyway, we can prevent the inefficiency of computing the hash twice by
letting the substituter tell Nix about the expected hash, which can
then verify it.
The generated attrset has drvPath and outPath with the right string context, type 'derivation', outputName with
the right name, all with a list of outputs, and an attribute for each output.
I see three uses for this (though certainly there may be more):
* Using derivations generated by something besides nix-instantiate (e.g. guix)
* Allowing packages provided by channels to be used in nix expressions. If a channel installed a valid deriver
for each package it provides into the store, then those could be imported and used as dependencies or installed
in environment.systemPackages, for example.
* Enable hydra to be consistent in how it treats inputs that are outputs of another build. Right now, if an
input is passed as an argument to the job, it is passed as a derivation, but if it is accessed via NIX_PATH
(i.e. through the <> syntax), then it is a path that can be imported. This is problematic because the build
being depended upon may have been built with non-obvious arguments passed to its jobset file. With this
feature, hydra can just set the name of that input to the path to its drv file in NIX_PATH
Incremental optimisation requires creating links in /nix/store/.links
to all files in the store. However, this means that if we delete a
store path, no files are actually deleted because links in
/nix/store/.links still exists. So we need to check /nix/store/.links
for files with a link count of 1 and delete them.
optimiseStore() now creates persistent, content-addressed hard links
in /nix/store/.links. For instance, if it encounters a file P with
hash H, it will create a hard link
P' = /nix/store/.link/<H>
to P if P' doesn't already exist; if P' exist, then P is replaced by a
hard link to P'. This is better than the previous in-memory map,
because it had the tendency to unnecessarily replace hard links with a
hard link to whatever happened to be the first file with a given hash
it encountered. It also allows on-the-fly, incremental optimisation.
To implement binary caches efficiently, Hydra needs to be able to map
the hash part of a store path (e.g. "gbg...zr7") to the full store
path (e.g. "/nix/store/gbg...kzr7-subversion-1.7.5"). (The binary
cache mechanism uses hash parts as a key for looking up store paths to
ensure privacy.) However, doing a search in the Nix store for
/nix/store/<hash>* is expensive since it requires reading the entire
directory. queryPathFromHashPart() prevents this by doing a cheap
database lookup.
queryValidPaths() combines multiple calls to isValidPath() in one.
This matters when using the Nix daemon because it reduces latency.
For instance, on "nix-env -qas \*" it reduces execution time from 5.7s
to 4.7s (which is indistinguishable from the non-daemon case).
Instead make a single call to querySubstitutablePathInfo() per
derivation output. This is faster and prevents having to implement
the "have" function in the binary cache substituter.
Getting substitute information using the binary cache substituter has
non-trivial latency overhead. A package or NixOS system configuration
can have hundreds of dependencies, and in the worst case (when the
local info cache is empty) we have to do a separate HTTP request for
each of these. If the ping time to the server is t, getting N info
files will take tN seconds; e.g., with a ping time of 0.1s to
nixos.org, sequentially downloading 1000 info files (a typical NixOS
config) will take at least 100 seconds.
To fix this problem, the binary cache substituter can now perform
requests in parallel. This required changing the substituter
interface to support a function querySubstitutablePathInfos() that
queries multiple paths at the same time, and rewriting queryMissing()
to take advantage of parallelism. (Due to local caching,
parallelising queryMissing() is sufficient for most use cases, since
it's almost always called before building a derivation and thus fills
the local info cache.)
For example, parallelism speeds up querying all 1056 paths in a
particular NixOS system configuration from 116s to 2.6s. It works so
well because the eccentricity of the top-level derivation in the
dependency graph is only 9. So we only need 10 round-trips (when
using an unlimited number of parallel connections) to get everything.
Currently we do a maximum of 150 parallel connections to the server.
Thus it's important that the binary cache server (e.g. nixos.org) has
a high connection limit. Alternatively we could use HTTP pipelining,
but WWW::Curl doesn't support it and libcurl has a hard-coded limit of
5 requests per pipeline.
In a private PID namespace, processes have PIDs that are separate from
the rest of the system. The initial child gets PID 1. Processes in
the chroot cannot see processes outside of the chroot. This improves
isolation between builds. However, processes on the outside can see
processes in the chroot and send signals to them (if they have
appropriate rights).
Since the builder gets PID 1, it serves as the reaper for zombies in
the chroot. This might turn out to be a problem. In that case we'll
need to have a small PID 1 process that sits in a loop calling wait().
In chroot builds, set the host name to "localhost" and the domain name
to "(none)" (the latter being the kernel's default). This improves
determinism a bit further.
P.S. I have to idea what UTS stands for.
This improves isolation a bit further, and it's just one extra flag in
the unshare() call.
P.S. It would be very cool to use CLONE_NEWPID (to put the builder in
a private PID namespace) as well, but that's slightly more risky since
having a builder start as PID 1 may cause problems.
On Linux it's possible to run a process in its own network namespace,
meaning that it gets its own set of network interfaces, disjunct from
the rest of the system. We use this to completely remove network
access to chroot builds, except that they get a private loopback
interface. This means that:
- Builders cannot connect to the outside network or to other processes
on the same machine, except processes within the same build.
- Vice versa, other processes cannot connect to processes in a chroot
build, and open ports/connections do not show up in "netstat".
- If two concurrent builders try to listen on the same port (e.g. as
part of a test), they no longer conflict with each other.
This was inspired by the "PrivateNetwork" flag in systemd.
Systemd can start the Nix daemon on demand when the Nix daemon socket
is first accessed. This is signalled through the LISTEN_FDS
environment variable, so all we need to do is check for that and then
use file descriptor 3 as the listen socket instead of creating one
ourselves.
