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.
The implementation of "partition" in Nixpkgs is O(n^2) (because of the
use of ++), and for some reason was causing stack overflows in
multi-threaded evaluation (not sure why).
This reduces "nix-env -qa --drv-path" runtime by 0.197s and memory
usage by 298 MiB (in non-Boehm mode).
Normally it's impossible to take a reference to the function passed to
callFunction, so some callers (e.g. ExprApp::eval) allocate that value
on the stack. For functors, a reference to the functor itself may be
kept, so we need to have it on the heap.
Fixes#1045
That is, unless --file is specified, the Nix search path is
synthesized into an attribute set. Thus you can say
$ nix build nixpkgs.hello
assuming $NIX_PATH contains an entry of the form "nixpkgs=...". This
is more verbose than
$ nix build hello
but is less ambiguous.
For example, you can now say:
configureFlags = "--prefix=${placeholder "out"} --includedir=${placeholder "dev"}";
The strings returned by the ‘placeholder’ builtin are replaced at
build time by the actual store paths corresponding to the specified
outputs.
Previously, you had to work around the inability to self-reference by doing stuff like:
preConfigure = ''
configureFlags+=" --prefix $out --includedir=$dev"
'';
or rely on ad-hoc variable interpolation semantics in Autoconf or Make
(e.g. --prefix=\$(out)), which doesn't always work.
E.g.
$ nix-build -I nixpkgs=git://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs '<nixpkgs>' -A hello
This is not extremely useful yet because you can't specify a
branch/revision.
The function builtins.fetchgit fetches Git repositories at evaluation
time, similar to builtins.fetchTarball. (Perhaps the name should be
changed, being confusing with respect to Nixpkgs's fetchgit function,
with works at build time.)
Example:
(import (builtins.fetchgit git://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs) {}).hello
or
(import (builtins.fetchgit {
url = git://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels;
rev = "nixos-16.03";
}) {}).hello
Note that the result does not contain a .git directory.
Thus, -I / $NIX_PATH entries are now downloaded only when they are
needed for evaluation. An error to download an entry is a non-fatal
warning (just like non-existant paths).
This does change the semantics of builtins.nixPath, which now returns
the original, rather than resulting path. E.g., before we had
[ { path = "/nix/store/hgm3yxf1lrrwa3z14zpqaj5p9vs0qklk-nixexprs.tar.xz"; prefix = "nixpkgs"; } ... ]
but now
[ { path = "https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-16.03/nixexprs.tar.xz"; prefix = "nixpkgs"; } ... ]
Fixes#792.
Also, move a few free-standing functions into StoreAPI and Derivation.
Also, introduce a non-nullable smart pointer, ref<T>, which is just a
wrapper around std::shared_ptr ensuring that the pointer is never
null. (For reference-counted values, this is better than passing a
"T&", because the latter doesn't maintain the refcount. Usually, the
caller will have a shared_ptr keeping the value alive, but that's not
always the case, e.g., when passing a reference to a std::thread via
std::bind.)
Also show types when nix cannot compare values of different types.
This is also more consistent since types are already shown when comparing values of the same not comparable type.
For example, "${{ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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'
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.
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
$NIX_PATH on NixOS, which includes paths like /etc/nixos/nixpkgs for
backward compatibility).
Now, in addition to a."${b}".c, you can write a.${b}.c (applicable
wherever dynamic attributes are valid).
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
This doesn't change any functionality but moves some behavior out of the
parser and into the evaluator in order to simplify the code.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
Since addAttr has to iterate through the AttrPath we pass it, it makes
more sense to just iterate through the AttrNames in addAttr instead. As
an added bonus, this allows attrsets where two dynamic attribute paths
have the same static leading part (see added test case for an example
that failed previously).
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
This adds new syntax for attribute names:
* attrs."${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").
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.
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
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>
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>
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':
...
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.
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".
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
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.
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'
...
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
