This speeds up commands like "nix cat-store". For example:
$ time nix cat-store --store https://cache.nixos.org?local-nar-cache=/tmp/nar-cache /nix/store/i60yncmq6w9dyv37zd2k454g0fkl3arl-systemd-234/etc/udev/udev.conf
real 0m4.336s
$ time nix cat-store --store https://cache.nixos.org?local-nar-cache=/tmp/nar-cache /nix/store/i60yncmq6w9dyv37zd2k454g0fkl3arl-systemd-234/etc/udev/udev.conf
real 0m0.045s
The primary motivation is to allow hydra-server to serve files from S3
binary caches. Previously Hydra had a hack to do "nix-store -r
<path>", but that fetches the entire closure so is prohibitively
expensive.
There is no garbage collection of the NAR cache yet. Also, the entire
NAR is read when accessing a single member file. We could generate the
NAR listing to provide random access.
Note: the NAR cache is indexed by the store path hash, not the content
hash, so NAR caches should not be shared between binary caches, unless
you're sure that all your builds are binary-reproducible.
Probably as a result of a bad merge in
4b8f1b0ec0, we had both a
BinaryCacheStoreAccessor and a
RemoteFSAccessor. BinaryCacheStore::getFSAccessor() returned the
latter, but BinaryCacheStore::addToStore() checked for the
former. This probably caused hydra-queue-runner to download paths that
it just uploaded.
Functions like copyClosure() had 3 bool arguments, which creates a
severe risk of mixing up arguments.
Also, implement copyClosure() using copyPaths().
This default implementation of buildPaths() does nothing if all
requested paths are already valid, and throws an "unsupported
operation" error otherwise. This fixes a regression introduced by
c30330df6f in binary cache and legacy
SSH stores.
The typical use is to inherit Config and add Setting<T> members:
class MyClass : private Config
{
Setting<int> foo{this, 123, "foo", "the number of foos to use"};
Setting<std::string> bar{this, "blabla", "bar", "the name of the bar"};
MyClass() : Config(readConfigFile("/etc/my-app.conf"))
{
std::cout << foo << "\n"; // will print 123 unless overriden
}
};
Currently, this is used by Store and its subclasses for store
parameters. You now get a warning if you specify a non-existant store
parameter in a store URI.
So if "text-compression=br", the .ls file in S3 will get a
Content-Encoding of "br". Brotli appears to compress better than xz
for this kind of file and is natively supported by browsers.
You can now set the store parameter "text-compression=br" to compress
textual files in the binary cache (i.e. narinfo and logs) using
Brotli. This sets the Content-Encoding header; the extension of
compressed files is unchanged.
You can separately specify the compression of log files using
"log-compression=br". This is useful when you don't want to compress
narinfo files for backward compatibility.
The store parameter "write-nar-listing=1" will cause BinaryCacheStore
to write a file ‘<store-hash>.ls.xz’ for each ‘<store-hash>.narinfo’
added to the binary cache. This file contains an XZ-compressed JSON
file describing the contents of the NAR, excluding the contents of
regular files.
E.g.
{
"version": 1,
"root": {
"type": "directory",
"entries": {
"lib": {
"type": "directory",
"entries": {
"Mcrt1.o": {
"type": "regular",
"size": 1288
},
"Scrt1.o": {
"type": "regular",
"size": 3920
},
}
}
}
...
}
}
(The actual file has no indentation.)
This is intended to speed up the NixOS channels programs index
generator [1], since fetching gazillions of large NARs from
cache.nixos.org is currently a bottleneck for updating the regular
(non-small) channel.
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-channel-scripts/blob/master/generate-programs-index.cc
The fact that queryPathInfo() is synchronous meant that we needed a
thread for every concurrent binary cache lookup, even though they end
up being handled by the same download thread. Requiring hundreds of
threads is not a good idea. So now there is an asynchronous version of
queryPathInfo() that takes a callback function to process the
result. Similarly, enqueueDownload() now takes a callback rather than
returning a future.
Thus, a command like
nix path-info --store https://cache.nixos.org/ -r /nix/store/slljrzwmpygy1daay14kjszsr9xix063-nixos-16.09beta231.dccf8c5
that returns 4941 paths now takes 1.87s using only 2 threads (the main
thread and the downloader thread). (This is with a prewarmed
CloudFront.)
This allows commands like "nix verify --all" or "nix path-info --all"
to work on S3 caches.
Unfortunately, this requires some ugly hackery: when querying the
contents of the bucket, we don't want to have to read every .narinfo
file. But the S3 bucket keys only include the hash part of each store
path, not the name part. So as a special exception
queryAllValidPaths() can now return store paths *without* the name
part, and queryPathInfo() accepts such store paths (returning a
ValidPathInfo object containing the full name).
Caching path info is generally useful. For instance, it speeds up "nix
path-info -rS /run/current-system" (i.e. showing the closure sizes of
all paths in the closure of the current system) from 5.6s to 0.15s.
This also eliminates some APIs like Store::queryDeriver() and
Store::queryReferences().
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.
Jörg Thalheim