Commit graph

181 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Eelco Dolstra
ba87b08f85
getEnv(): Return std::optional
This allows distinguishing between an empty value and no value.
2019-11-22 16:18:13 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
c119ab9db0
Enable recursive Nix using a feature
Derivations that want to use recursion should now set

  requiredSystemFeatures = [ "recursive-nix" ];

to make the daemon socket appear.

Also, Nix should be configured with "experimental-features =
recursive-nix".
2019-11-06 00:55:03 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
aabf5c86c9
Add experimental-features setting
Experimental features are now opt-in. There is currently one
experimental feature: "nix-command" (which enables the "nix"
command. This will allow us to merge experimental features more
quickly, without committing to supporting them indefinitely.

Typical usage:

$ nix build --experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' nixpkgs#hello

(cherry picked from commit 8e478c2341,
without the "flakes" feature)
2019-10-21 13:34:44 +02:00
Linus Heckemann
f3b8173a93 config: use all of XDG_CONFIG_DIRS
Previously, config would only be read from XDG_CONFIG_HOME. This change
allows reading config from additional directories, which enables e.g.
per-project binary caches or chroot stores with the help of direnv.
2018-10-31 09:24:43 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
1e7b8deea7
Check requiredSystemFeatures for local builds
For example, this prevents a "kvm" build on machines that don't have
KVM.

Fixes #2012.
2018-09-28 16:10:27 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
737ed88f35
Modularize config settings
Allow global config settings to be defined in multiple Config
classes. For example, this means that libutil can have settings and
evaluator settings can be moved out of libstore. The Config classes
are registered in a new GlobalConfig class to which config files
etc. are applied.

Relevant to https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2009 in that it
removes the need for ad hoc handling of useCaseHack, which was the
underlying cause of that issue.
2018-05-30 13:28:01 +02:00
Shea Levy
dc0a542c9f
initPlugins: Fix dlopen error message. 2018-04-11 21:02:50 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
75a1d96cfd
Merge branch 'register-settings' of https://github.com/shlevy/nix 2018-02-19 13:58:34 +01:00
Matthew Bauer
8f186722a9 Set backup MANPATH in case man path isn’t set correctly.
Previously, this would fail at startup for non-NixOS installs:

nix-env --help

The fix for this is to just use "nixManDir" as the value for MANPATH
when spawning "man".

To test this, I’m using the following:

$ nix-build release.nix -A build
$ MANPATH= ./result/bin/nix-env --help

Fixes #1627
2018-02-15 10:20:02 -06:00
Shea Levy
de4934ab3b
Allow plugins to define new settings. 2018-02-13 14:43:32 -05:00
Shea Levy
b8739f2fb3
Enable specifying directories in plugin-files. 2018-02-13 11:25:01 -05:00
Shea Levy
88cd2d41ac
Add plugins to make Nix more extensible.
All plugins in plugin-files will be dlopened, allowing them to
statically construct instances of the various Register* types Nix
supports.
2018-02-08 12:44:37 -05:00
Eelco Dolstra
6cdaa858d0
Propagate flags like --sandbox to the daemon properly 2017-11-21 18:50:56 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
0d59f1ca49
nix: Respect -I, --arg, --argstr
Also, random cleanup to argument handling.
2017-10-24 12:58:34 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
af241ae7d3
Remove the builder-files option
You can now include files via the "builders" option, using the syntax
"@<filename>". Having only one option makes it easier to override
builders completely.

For backward compatibility, the default is "@/etc/nix/machines", or
"@<filename>" for each file name in NIX_REMOTE_SYSTEMS.
2017-10-24 10:54:43 +02:00
Jörg Thalheim
2fd8f8bb99 Replace Unicode quotes in user-facing strings by ASCII
Relevant RFC: NixOS/rfcs#4

$ ag -l | xargs sed -i -e "/\"/s/’/'/g;/\"/s/‘/'/g"
2017-07-30 12:32:45 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
847f19a5f7
Provide a builtin default for $NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE
This is mostly to ensure that when Nix is started on macOS via a
launchd service or sshd (for a remote build), it gets a certificate
bundle.
2017-06-12 16:44:43 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
186571965d
Don't show flags from config settings in "nix --help" 2017-06-07 18:41:20 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
b8283773bd
nix: Make all options available as flags
Thus, instead of ‘--option <name> <value>’, you can write ‘--<name>
<value>’. So

  --option http-connections 100

becomes

  --http-connections 100

Apart from brevity, the difference is that it's not an error to set a
non-existent option via --option, but unrecognized arguments are
fatal.

Boolean options have special treatment: they're mapped to the
argument-less flags ‘--<name>’ and ‘--no-<name>’. E.g.

  --option auto-optimise-store false

becomes

  --no-auto-optimise-store
2017-06-07 16:17:17 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
a2d92bb20e
Add --with-sandbox-shell configure flag
And add a 116 KiB ash shell from busybox to the release build. This
helps to make sandbox builds work out of the box on non-NixOS systems
and with diverted stores.
2017-05-15 17:36:32 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
7f6837a0f6
Replace $NIX_REMOTE_SYSTEMS with an option "builder-files"
Also, to unify with hydra-queue-runner, allow it to be a list of
files.
2017-05-02 15:46:09 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
efa4bdbfcd
Improve nix show-config --json
In particular, show descriptions. This could be used for manpage
generation etc.
2017-04-20 17:34:47 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
4410e9d995
Setting: Remove "Tag" template argument 2017-04-20 16:52:53 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
f05d5f89ff
Read per-user settings from ~/.config/nix/nix.conf 2017-04-20 14:58:16 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
ba9ad29fdb
Convert Settings to the new config system
This makes all config options self-documenting.

Unknown or unparseable config settings and --option flags now cause a
warning.
2017-04-13 20:53:23 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
1860070548
Merge branch 'rework-options' of https://github.com/copumpkin/nix 2017-04-13 16:15:51 +02:00
Shea Levy
0bb8db257d Add exec primop behind allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation.
Execute a given program with the (optional) given arguments as the
user running the evaluation, parsing stdout as an expression to be
evaluated.

There are many use cases for nix that would benefit from being able to
run arbitrary code during evaluation, including but not limited to:

* Automatic git fetching to get a sha256 from a git revision
* git rev-parse HEAD
* Automatic extraction of information from build specifications from
  other tools, particularly language-specific package managers like
  cabal or npm
* Secrets decryption (e.g. with nixops)
* Private repository fetching

Ideally, we would add this functionality in a more principled way to
nix, but in the mean time 'builtins.exec' can be used to get these
tasks done.

The primop is only available when the
'allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation' nix option is true. That
flag also enables the 'importNative' primop, which is strictly more
powerful but less convenient (since it requires compiling a plugin
against the running version of nix).
2017-03-30 08:04:21 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
0afeb7f51e
Store: Add a method for getting build logs
This allows various Store implementations to provide different ways to
get build logs. For example, BinaryCacheStore can get the build logs
from the binary cache.

Also, remove the log-servers option since we can use substituters for
this.
2017-03-15 16:48:29 +01:00
Shea Levy
93f863be96 Add option to disable import-from-derivation completely, even if the drv is already realized 2017-03-08 08:46:12 -05:00
Shea Levy
3cc18d3753 Properly set the caFile for aws-sdk-cpp s3 2017-03-06 14:30:35 -05:00
Eelco Dolstra
7251d048fa
Support auto-configuration of build-max-jobs
"build-max-jobs" and the "-j" option can now be set to "auto" to use
the number of CPUs in the system. (Unlike build-cores, it doesn't use
0 to imply auto-configuration, because a) magic values are a bad idea
in general; b) 0 is a legitimate value used to disable local
building.)

Fixes #1198.
2017-02-28 12:54:50 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
3fab1f04a7
_SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN -> std:🧵:hardware_concurrency() 2017-02-27 16:01:54 +01:00
Dan Peebles
e7cb2847ab Explicitly model all settings and fail on unrecognized ones
Previously, the Settings class allowed other code to query for string
properties, which led to a proliferation of code all over the place making
up new options without any sort of central registry of valid options. This
commit pulls all those options back into the central Settings class and
removes the public get() methods, to discourage future abuses like that.

Furthermore, because we know the full set of options ahead of time, we
now fail loudly if someone enters an unrecognized option, thus preventing
subtle typos. With some template fun, we could probably also dump the full
set of options (with documentation, defaults, etc.) to the command line,
but I'm not doing that yet here.
2017-02-22 20:19:25 -05:00
Eelco Dolstra
cde4b60919
Move netrcFile to Settings
Also get rid of Settings::processEnvironment(), it appears to be
useless.
2017-02-16 14:50:41 +01:00
Tuomas Tynkkynen
2cd468874f Include config.h implicitly with '-include config.h' in CFLAGS
Because config.h can #define things like _FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 and not
every compilation unit includes config.h, we currently compile half of
Nix with _FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 and other half with _FILE_OFFSET_BITS
unset. This causes major havoc with the Settings class on e.g. 32-bit ARM,
where different compilation units disagree with the struct layout.

E.g.:

diff --git a/src/libstore/globals.cc b/src/libstore/globals.cc
@@ -166,6 +166,8 @@ void Settings::update()
     _get(useSubstitutes, "build-use-substitutes");
+    fprintf(stderr, "at Settings::update(): &useSubstitutes = %p\n", &nix::settings.useSubstitutes);
     _get(buildUsersGroup, "build-users-group");
diff --git a/src/libstore/remote-store.cc b/src/libstore/remote-store.cc
+++ b/src/libstore/remote-store.cc
@@ -138,6 +138,8 @@ void RemoteStore::initConnection(Connection & conn)
 void RemoteStore::setOptions(Connection & conn)
 {
+    fprintf(stderr, "at RemoteStore::setOptions(): &useSubstitutes = %p\n", &nix::settings.useSubstitutes);
     conn.to << wopSetOptions

Gave me:

at Settings::update(): &useSubstitutes = 0xb6e5c5cb
at RemoteStore::setOptions(): &useSubstitutes = 0xb6e5c5c7

That was not a fun one to debug!
2017-02-08 21:51:02 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
215b70f51e
Revert "Get rid of unicode quotes (#1140)"
This reverts commit f78126bfd6. There
really is no need for such a massive change...
2016-11-26 00:38:01 +01:00
Guillaume Maudoux
f78126bfd6 Get rid of unicode quotes (#1140) 2016-11-25 15:48:27 +01:00
Shea Levy
c4969aebaf Add nix.conf options for -k and -K
Fixes #1084
2016-10-27 12:49:34 -04:00
Jude Taylor
596e4a5693 remove old traces of resolve-system-dependencies 2016-08-13 15:27:49 -07:00
Eelco Dolstra
2fad86f361 Remove $NIX_DB_DIR
This variable has no reason to exist, given $NIX_STATE_DIR.
2016-08-10 18:05:35 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
aa3bc3d5dc Eliminate the substituter mechanism
Substitution is now simply a Store -> Store copy operation, most
typically from BinaryCacheStore to LocalStore.
2016-04-29 13:57:08 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
5761827d5b Show the log tail when a build fails
If --no-build-output is given (which will become the default for the
"nix" command at least), show the last 10 lines of the build output if
the build fails.
2016-04-25 19:18:45 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
6e1b099279 Remove --print-build-trace
This was added to support Hydra, but Hydra no longer uses it.
2016-04-25 19:18:45 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
867967265b Remove manifest support
Manifests have been superseded by binary caches for years. This also
gets rid of nix-pull, nix-generate-patches and bsdiff/bspatch.
2016-04-11 16:20:15 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
8cffec8485 Remove failed build caching
This feature was implemented for Hydra, but Hydra no longer uses it.
2016-04-08 18:19:04 +02:00
Jude Taylor
76f3ba42fd move preBuildHook defaulting to globals.cc 2015-10-21 14:39:08 -07:00
Eelco Dolstra
6bd2c7bb38 OCD: foreach -> C++11 ranged for 2015-07-17 20:13:56 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
ba63ec6f39 Make /nix/var/nix/db/reserved bigger
Issue #564.
2015-06-22 15:47:40 +02:00
Shea Levy
4d652875bd Add the pre-build hook.
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.
2015-04-18 16:56:02 -04:00
Shea Levy
fd6774e285 Revert "Add the pre-build hook."
Going to reimplement differently.

This reverts commit 1e4a4a2e9f.
2015-04-18 14:59:58 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
035aeb9547 Fix using restricted mode with chroots 2015-04-16 18:46:17 +02:00
Shea Levy
1e4a4a2e9f Add the pre-build hook.
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.
2015-04-12 12:56:38 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
c1f04fae35 Implement a TTL on cached fetchurl/fetchTarball results
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.
2015-04-09 11:55:36 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
99897f6979 Use chroots for all derivations
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.
2015-02-23 15:54:31 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
d37d012774 Settings: Add bool get() 2014-09-17 15:18:13 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
11849a320e Use proper quotes everywhere 2014-08-20 18:03:48 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
988bf59421 Move some options out of globals 2014-08-04 18:13:14 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
daccd68999 Refactor 2014-08-04 18:02:29 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
d5a076c36f Add option ‘build-extra-chroot-dirs’
This is useful for extending (rather than overriding) the default set
of chroot paths.
2014-08-04 18:00:00 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
bb45092f72 Make chroot builds easier to set up
By default, we now include /bin/sh as a bind-mount of bash.
2014-08-04 17:09:26 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
67937907ca nix-daemon: Pass on the user's $SSH_AUTH_SOCK to the SSH substituter 2014-07-25 18:02:48 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
71a20d4d95 Change the default for use-ssh-substituter to ‘true’
Now you only have to pass ‘--option ssh-substituter-hosts
nix-ssh@bla’ to enable SSH substitution.
2014-07-25 12:57:12 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
ee3c5d7916 Revert old useBuildHook behaviour 2014-07-19 02:25:47 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
049c0eb49c nix-daemon: Add trusted-users and allowed-users options
‘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.
2014-07-17 16:57:07 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
276a40b31f Handle case collisions on case-insensitive systems
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.
2014-07-16 16:02:05 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
e196eecbe6 Allow $NIX_BUILD_HOOK to be relative to Nix libexec directory 2014-07-11 13:55:06 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
8504e7d604 allow-arbitrary-code-during-evaluation -> allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation 2014-06-27 11:20:16 +02:00
Shea Levy
d62f46e500 Only add the importNative primop if the allow-arbitrary-code-during-evaluation option is true (default false) 2014-06-24 10:50:03 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
9f9080e2c0 nix-store -l: Fetch build logs from the Internet
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.
2014-05-21 17:19:36 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
de4cdd0d47 Set build-max-jobs to the number of available cores by default
More zero configuration.
2014-05-02 12:51:43 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
ada3e3fa15 When running as root, use build users by default
This removes the need to have a nix.conf, and prevents people from
accidentally running Nix builds as root.
2014-05-02 12:46:03 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
1017bd68ea Set up a private /dev/pts in the chroot 2014-02-27 23:35:23 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
3fd01b171a Set up a minimal /dev in chroots
Not bind-mounting the /dev from the host also solves the problem with
/dev/shm being a symlink to something not in the chroot.
2014-02-27 23:17:53 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
dcaea042fc Only start download-via-ssh if it's enabled 2014-02-26 13:41:03 +01:00
Shea Levy
df5de9dfd7 Add use-ssh-substituter setting.
It defaults to false and can be overridden by RemoteStore.

Untested currently, just quickly put this together
2014-02-26 13:32:47 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
dba33d4018 Minor style fixes 2014-02-14 11:48:42 +01:00
Shea Levy
1614603165 Pass in params by const ref
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
2014-02-10 06:49:37 -05:00
Shea Levy
64e23d0a38 Add download-via-ssh substituter
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>
2014-02-08 00:13:33 -05:00
Eelco Dolstra
6b5f89f2cf Drop the dependency on Automake 2013-11-22 19:30:24 +00:00
Eelco Dolstra
89e6781cc5 Make function calls show up in stack traces again
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.
2013-11-12 12:51:59 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
936f9d45ba Don't apply the CPU affinity hack to nix-shell (and other Perl programs)
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.
2013-09-06 16:36:56 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
efe4289464 Add an option to limit the log output of builders
This is mostly useful for Hydra to deal with builders that get stuck
in an infinite loop writing data to stdout/stderr.
2013-09-02 11:58:18 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
9b11165aec Disable the copy-from-other-stores substituter
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).
2013-06-20 12:01:33 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra
bdd4646338 Revert "Prevent config.h from being clobbered"
This reverts commit 28bba8c44f.
2013-03-08 01:24:59 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
28bba8c44f Prevent config.h from being clobbered 2013-03-07 23:55:55 +01:00
Ludovic Courtès
3e067ac11c Add `Settings::nixDaemonSocketFile'. 2013-02-19 10:19:18 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
b7629778ef Allow mounting a path in a different location in the chroot
Fixes #24.
2012-12-29 23:04:02 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
8b8ee53bc7 Add builtin constants ‘langVersion’ and ‘nixVersion’
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".
2012-11-27 13:29:55 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
f581ce0b0c Don't start copy-from-other-stores if $NIX_OTHER_STORES is unset
Slight optimisation.
2012-11-09 14:58:10 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra
76e88871b2 Templatise tokenizeString() 2012-09-19 15:43:23 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
6c4ac29917 Disable auto store optimisation for now
I've seen operations like "nix-store --import" take much longer on one
system.  So default to off until I've investigated this a bit further.
2012-09-13 10:28:20 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
eb7849e3a2 Prevent an injection attack in passing untrusted options to substituters 2012-07-31 18:50:32 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
90d9c58d4d Pass all --option flags to the daemon 2012-07-31 18:19:44 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
89a8207029 Add an option ‘build-fallback’ (equivalent to the --fallback flag) 2012-07-31 17:56:02 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
97421eb5ec Refactor settings processing
Put all Nix configuration flags in a Settings object.
2012-07-30 19:55:41 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
d059bf48e4 Pass configuration settings to the substituters
Previously substituters could read nix.conf themselves, but this
didn't take --option flags into account.
2012-07-30 16:09:54 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
f2bdc87595 Update the other substituters 2012-07-11 18:52:09 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
11800e6198 download-from-binary-cache: parallelise fetching of NAR info files
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.
2012-07-06 19:08:20 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra
993fa94fb4 * Move initialisation of variables like nixConfDir from libmain to
libstore so that the Perl bindings can use it as well.  It's vital
  that the Perl bindings use the configuration file, because otherwise
  nix-copy-closure will fail with a ‘database locked’ message if the
  value of ‘use-sqlite-wal’ is changed from the default.
2011-11-22 17:28:41 +00:00
Ludovic Courtès
5c9e9f732d Add support for the build-timeout' and --timeout' options. 2011-06-30 15:19:13 +00:00