When working on some more complex Nix code, there are sometimes rather
unhelpful or misleading error messages, especially if coerce-errors are
thrown.
This patch is a first steps towards improving that. I'm happy to file
more changes after that, but I'd like to gather some feedback first.
To summarize, this patch does the following things:
* Attrsets (a.k.a. `Bindings` in `libexpr`) now have a `Pos`. This is
helpful e.g. to identify which attribute-set in `listToAttrs` is
invalid.
* The `Value`-struct has a new method named `determinePos` which tries
to guess the position of a value and falls back to a default if that's
not possible.
This can be used to provide better messages if a coercion fails.
* The new `determinePos`-API is used by `builtins.concatMap` now. With
that change, Nix shows the exact position in the error where a wrong
value was returned by the lambda.
To make sure it's still obvious that `concatMap` is the problem,
another stack-frame was added.
* The changes described above can be added to every other `primop`, but
first I'd like to get some feedback about the overall approach.
Changes:
* The divider lines are gone. These were in practice a bit confusing,
in particular with --show-trace or --keep-going, since then there
were multiple lines, suggesting a start/end which wasn't the case.
* Instead, multi-line error messages are now indented to align with
the prefix (e.g. "error: ").
* The 'description' field is gone since we weren't really using it.
* 'hint' is renamed to 'msg' since it really wasn't a hint.
* The error is now printed *before* the location info.
* The 'name' field is no longer printed since most of the time it
wasn't very useful since it was just the name of the exception (like
EvalError). Ideally in the future this would be a unique, easily
googleable error ID (like rustc).
* "trace:" is now just "…". This assumes error contexts start with
something like "while doing X".
Example before:
error: --- AssertionError ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix
at: (7:7) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/misc/hello/default.nix
6|
7| x = assert false; 1;
| ^
8|
assertion 'false' failed
----------------------------------------------------- show-trace -----------------------------------------------------
trace: while evaluating the attribute 'x' of the derivation 'hello-2.10'
at: (192:11) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix
191| // (lib.optionalAttrs (!(attrs ? name) && attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)) {
192| name = "${attrs.pname}-${attrs.version}";
| ^
193| } // (lib.optionalAttrs (stdenv.hostPlatform != stdenv.buildPlatform && !dontAddHostSuffix && (attrs ? name || (attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)))) {
Example after:
error: assertion 'false' failed
at: (7:7) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/misc/hello/default.nix
6|
7| x = assert false; 1;
| ^
8|
… while evaluating the attribute 'x' of the derivation 'hello-2.10'
at: (192:11) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix
191| // (lib.optionalAttrs (!(attrs ? name) && attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)) {
192| name = "${attrs.pname}-${attrs.version}";
| ^
193| } // (lib.optionalAttrs (stdenv.hostPlatform != stdenv.buildPlatform && !dontAddHostSuffix && (attrs ? name || (attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)))) {
Move clearValue inside Value
mkInt instead of setInt
mkBool instead of setBool
mkString instead of setString
mkPath instead of setPath
mkNull instead of setNull
mkAttrs instead of setAttrs
mkList instead of setList*
mkThunk instead of setThunk
mkApp instead of setApp
mkLambda instead of setLambda
mkBlackhole instead of setBlackhole
mkPrimOp instead of setPrimOp
mkPrimOpApp instead of setPrimOpApp
mkExternal instead of setExternal
mkFloat instead of setFloat
Add note that the static mk* function should be removed eventually
Crucially this introduces BoehmGCStackAllocator, but it also
adds a bunch of wiring to avoid making libutil depend on bdw-gc.
Part of the solutions for #4178, #4200
Otherwise the result of the printing can't be parsed back correctly by
Nix (because the unescaped `${` will be parsed as the begining of an
anti-quotation).
Fix#3989
The change in 626200713b didn't account
for when the number of auto arguments is bigger than the number of
formal arguments. This causes the following:
$ nix-instantiate --eval -E '{ ... }@args: args.foo' --argstr foo foo
nix-instantiate: src/libexpr/attr-set.hh:55: void nix::Bindings::push_back(const nix::Attr&): Assertion `size_ < capacity_' failed.
Aborted (core dumped)
The command line options --arg and --argstr that are used by a bunch of
CLI commands to pass arguments to top-level functions in files go
through the same code-path as auto-calling top-level functions with
their default arguments - this, however, was only passing the arguments
that were *explicitly* mentioned in the formals of the function - in the
case of an as-pattern with an ellipsis (eg args @ { ... }) extra passed
arguments would get omitted. This fixes that to instead pass *all*
specified auto args in the case that our function has an ellipsis.
Fixes#598
This allows interactively inspecting the state of the evaluator at the
point of failure.
Example:
$ nix eval path:///home/eelco/Dev/nix/flake2#modules.hello-closure._final --start-repl-on-eval-errors
error: --- TypeError -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix
at: (20:53) in file: /nix/store/4264z41dxfdiqr95svmpnxxxwhfplhy0-source/flake.nix
19|
20| _final = builtins.foldl' (xs: mod: xs // (mod._module.config { config = _final; })) _defaults _allModules;
| ^
21| };
attempt to call something which is not a function but a set
Starting REPL to allow you to inspect the current state of the evaluator.
The following extra variables are in scope: arg, fun
Welcome to Nix version 2.4. Type :? for help.
nix-repl> fun
error: --- EvalError -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix
at: (150:28) in file: /nix/store/4264z41dxfdiqr95svmpnxxxwhfplhy0-source/flake.nix
149|
150| tarballClosure = (module {
| ^
151| extends = [ self.modules.derivation ];
attribute 'derivation' missing
nix-repl> :t fun
a set
nix-repl> builtins.attrNames fun
[ "tarballClosure" ]
nix-repl>
If you do a fetchTree on a Git repository, whether the result contains
a revCount attribute should not depend on whether that repository
happens to be a shallow clone or not. That would complicate caching a
lot and would be semantically messy. So applying fetchTree/fetchGit to
a shallow repository is now an error unless you pass the attribute
'shallow = true'. If 'shallow = true', we don't return revCount, even
if the repository is not actually shallow.
Note that Nix itself is not doing shallow clones at the moment. But it
could do so as an optimisation if the user specifies 'shallow = true'.
Issue #2988.
Includes the expression of the condition in the assertion message if
the assertion failed, making assertions much easier to debug. eg.
error: assertion (withPython -> (python2Packages != null)) failed at pkgs/tools/security/nmap/default.nix:11:1
This prevents them from being inlined. On gcc 9, this reduces the
stack size needed for
nix-instantiate '<nixpkgs>' -A texlive.combined.scheme-full --dry-run
from 12.9 MiB to 4.8 MiB.
Most functions now take a StorePath argument rather than a Path (which
is just an alias for std::string). The StorePath constructor ensures
that the path is syntactically correct (i.e. it looks like
<store-dir>/<base32-hash>-<name>). Similarly, functions like
buildPaths() now take a StorePathWithOutputs, rather than abusing Path
by adding a '!<outputs>' suffix.
Note that the StorePath type is implemented in Rust. This involves
some hackery to allow Rust values to be used directly in C++, via a
helper type whose destructor calls the Rust type's drop()
function. The main issue is the dynamic nature of C++ move semantics:
after we have moved a Rust value, we should not call the drop function
on the original value. So when we move a value, we set the original
value to bitwise zero, and the destructor only calls drop() if the
value is not bitwise zero. This should be sufficient for most types.
Also lots of minor cleanups to the C++ API to make it more modern
(e.g. using std::optional and std::string_view in some places).
The FunctionCallTrace object consumes a few hundred bytes of stack
space, even when tracing is disabled. This was causing stack overflows:
$ nix-instantiate '<nixpkgs> -A texlive.combined.scheme-full --dry-run
error: stack overflow (possible infinite recursion)
This is with the default stack size of 8 MiB.
Putting the object on the heap reduces stack usage to < 5 MiB.
With this patch, and this file I called `log.py`:
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
#!nix-shell -i python3 -p python3 --pure
import sys
from pprint import pprint
stack = []
timestack = []
for line in open(sys.argv[1]):
components = line.strip().split(" ", 2)
if components[0] != "function-trace":
continue
direction = components[1]
components = components[2].rsplit(" ", 2)
loc = components[0]
_at = components[1]
time = int(components[2])
if direction == "entered":
stack.append(loc)
timestack.append(time)
elif direction == "exited":
dur = time - timestack.pop()
vst = ";".join(stack)
print(f"{vst} {dur}")
stack.pop()
and:
nix-instantiate --trace-function-calls -vvvv ../nixpkgs/pkgs/top-level/release.nix -A unstable > log.matthewbauer 2>&1
./log.py ./log.matthewbauer > log.matthewbauer.folded
flamegraph.pl --title matthewbauer-post-pr log.matthewbauer.folded > log.matthewbauer.folded.svg
I can make flame graphs like: http://gsc.io/log.matthewbauer.folded.svg
---
Includes test cases around function call failures and tryEval. Uses
RAII so the finish is always called at the end of the function.
In EvalState::checkSourcePath, the path is checked against the list of
allowed paths first and later it's checked again *after* resolving
symlinks.
The resolving of the symlinks is done via canonPath, which also strips
out "../" and "./". However after the canonicalisation the error message
pointing out that the path is not allowed prints the symlink target in
the error message.
Even if we'd suppress the message, symlink targets could still be leaked
if the symlink target doesn't exist (in this case the error is thrown in
canonPath).
So instead, we now do canonPath() without symlink resolving first before
even checking against the list of allowed paths and then later do the
symlink resolving and checking the allowed paths again.
The first call to canonPath() should get rid of all the "../" and "./",
so in theory the only way to leak a symlink if the attacker is able to
put a symlink in one of the paths allowed by restricted evaluation mode.
For the latter I don't think this is part of the threat model, because
if the attacker can write to that path, the attack vector is even
larger.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@nix.build>
This reduces the risk of object liveness misdetection. For example,
Glibc has an internal variable "mp_" that often points to a Boehm
object, keeping it alive unnecessarily. Since we don't store any
actual roots in global variables, we can just disable data segment
scanning.
With this, the max RSS doing 100 evaluations of
nixos.tests.firefox.x86_64-linux.drvPath went from 718 MiB to 455 MiB.
If the Env denotes a 'with', then values[0] may be an Expr* cast to a
Value*. For code that generically traverses Values/Envs, it's useful
to know this.
E.g. this makes
nix eval --restrict-eval -I /nix/store/foo '(builtins.readFile "/nix/store/foo/symlink/bla")'
(where /nix/store/foo/symlink is a symlink to another path in the
closure of /nix/store/foo) succeed.
This fixes a regression in Hydra compared to Nix 1.x (where there were
no restrictions at all on access to the Nix store).
builtins.path allows specifying the name of a path (which makes paths
with store-illegal names now addable), allows adding paths with flat
instead of recursive hashes, allows specifying a filter (so is a
generalization of filterSource), and allows specifying an expected
hash (enabling safe path adding in pure mode).
In this mode, the following restrictions apply:
* The builtins currentTime, currentSystem and storePath throw an
error.
* $NIX_PATH and -I are ignored.
* fetchGit and fetchMercurial require a revision hash.
* fetchurl and fetchTarball require a sha256 attribute.
* No file system access is allowed outside of the paths returned by
fetch{Git,Mercurial,url,Tarball}. Thus 'nix build -f ./foo.nix' is
not allowed.
Thus, the evaluation result is completely reproducible from the
command line arguments. E.g.
nix build --pure-eval '(
let
nix = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; rev = "9c927de4b179a6dd210dd88d34bda8af4b575680"; };
nixpkgs = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; ref = "release-17.09"; rev = "66b4de79e3841530e6d9c6baf98702aa1f7124e4"; };
in (import (nix + "/release.nix") { inherit nix nixpkgs; }).build.x86_64-linux
)'
The goal is to enable completely reproducible and traceable
evaluation. For example, a NixOS configuration could be fully
described by a single Git commit hash. 'nixos-rebuild' would do
something like
nix build --pure-eval '(
(import (fetchGit { url = file:///my-nixos-config; rev = "..."; })).system
')
where the Git repository /my-nixos-config would use further fetchGit
calls or Git externals to fetch Nixpkgs and whatever other
dependencies it has. Either way, the commit hash would uniquely
identify the NixOS configuration and allow it to reproduced.
Functions like copyClosure() had 3 bool arguments, which creates a
severe risk of mixing up arguments.
Also, implement copyClosure() using copyPaths().
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.
Previously, all derivation attributes had to be coerced into strings
so that they could be passed via the environment. This is lossy
(e.g. lists get flattened, necessitating configureFlags
vs. configureFlagsArray, of which the latter cannot be specified as an
attribute), doesn't support attribute sets at all, and has size
limitations (necessitating hacks like passAsFile).
This patch adds a new mode for passing attributes to builders, namely
encoded as a JSON file ".attrs.json" in the current directory of the
builder. This mode is activated via the special attribute
__structuredAttrs = true;
(The idea is that one day we can set this in stdenv.mkDerivation.)
For example,
stdenv.mkDerivation {
__structuredAttrs = true;
name = "foo";
buildInputs = [ pkgs.hello pkgs.cowsay ];
doCheck = true;
hardening.format = false;
}
results in a ".attrs.json" file containing (sans the indentation):
{
"buildInputs": [],
"builder": "/nix/store/ygl61ycpr2vjqrx775l1r2mw1g2rb754-bash-4.3-p48/bin/bash",
"configureFlags": [
"--with-foo",
"--with-bar=1 2"
],
"doCheck": true,
"hardening": {
"format": false
},
"name": "foo",
"nativeBuildInputs": [
"/nix/store/10h6li26i7g6z3mdpvra09yyf10mmzdr-hello-2.10",
"/nix/store/4jnvjin0r6wp6cv1hdm5jbkx3vinlcvk-cowsay-3.03"
],
"propagatedBuildInputs": [],
"propagatedNativeBuildInputs": [],
"stdenv": "/nix/store/f3hw3p8armnzy6xhd4h8s7anfjrs15n2-stdenv",
"system": "x86_64-linux"
}
"passAsFile" is ignored in this mode because it's not needed - large
strings are included directly in the JSON representation.
It is up to the builder to do something with the JSON
representation. For example, in bash-based builders, lists/attrsets of
string values could be mapped to bash (associative) arrays.
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.
Thus, -I / $NIX_PATH entries are now downloaded only when they are
needed for evaluation. An error to download an entry is a non-fatal
warning (just like non-existant paths).
This does change the semantics of builtins.nixPath, which now returns
the original, rather than resulting path. E.g., before we had
[ { path = "/nix/store/hgm3yxf1lrrwa3z14zpqaj5p9vs0qklk-nixexprs.tar.xz"; prefix = "nixpkgs"; } ... ]
but now
[ { path = "https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-16.03/nixexprs.tar.xz"; prefix = "nixpkgs"; } ... ]
Fixes#792.
Also, move a few free-standing functions into StoreAPI and Derivation.
Also, introduce a non-nullable smart pointer, ref<T>, which is just a
wrapper around std::shared_ptr ensuring that the pointer is never
null. (For reference-counted values, this is better than passing a
"T&", because the latter doesn't maintain the refcount. Usually, the
caller will have a shared_ptr keeping the value alive, but that's not
always the case, e.g., when passing a reference to a std::thread via
std::bind.)
For example, "${{ 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 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.
