Users may want to mount a filesystem just for the Nix database, with
the filesystem's parameters specially tuned for sqlite. For example, on
ZFS you might set the recordsize to 64k after changing the database's
page size to 65536.
nix-daemon.socket is used to socket-activate nix-daemon.service when
/nix/var/nix/daemon-socket/socket is accessed.
In container usecases, sometimes /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket is
bind-mounted read-only into the container.
In these cases, we want to skip starting nix-daemon.socket.
However, since systemd 250, `ConditionPathIsReadWrite` is also not met
if /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket doesn't exist at all. This means, a
regular NixOS system will skip starting nix-daemon.socket:
> [ 237.187747] systemd[1]: Nix Daemon Socket was skipped because of a failed condition check (ConditionPathIsReadWrite=/nix/var/nix/daemon-socket).
To prevent this from happening, ship a tmpfiles file that'll cause the
directory to be created if it doesn't exist already.
In the case of NixOS, we can just add Nix to `systemd.tmpfiles.packages`
and have these files picked up automatically.
Previously, the build system used uname(1) output when it wanted to
check the operating system it was being built for, which meant that it
didn't take into-account cross-compilation when the build and host
operating systems were different.
To fix this, instead of consulting uname output, we consult the host
triple, specifically the third "kernel" part.
For "kernel"s with stable ABIs, like Linux or Cygwin, we can use a
simple ifeq to test whether we're compiling for that system, but for
other platforms, like Darwin, FreeBSD, or Solaris, we have to use a
more complicated check to take into account the version numbers at the
end of the "kernel"s. I couldn't find a way to just strip these
version numbers in GNU Make without shelling out, which would be even
more ugly IMO. Because these checks differ between kernels, and the
patsubst ones are quite fiddly, I've added variables for each host OS
we might want to check to make them easier to reuse.
Florian Klink
Alyssa Ross
Jörg Thalheim