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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 ];
