I regularly pass around simple scripts by using nix-shell as the script
interpreter, eg. like this:
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
#!nix-shell -p dd_rescue coreutils bash -i bash
While this works most of the time, I recently had one occasion where it
would not and the above would result in the following:
$ sudo ./myscript.sh
bash: ./myscript.sh: No such file or directory
Note the "sudo" here, because this error only occurs if we're root.
The reason for the latter is because running Nix as root means that we
can directly access the store, which makes sure we use a filesystem
namespace to make the store writable. XXX - REWORD!
So when stracing the process, I stumbled on the following sequence:
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/proc/self/ns/mnt", O_RDONLY) = 3
unshare(CLONE_NEWNS) = 0
... later ...
getcwd("/the/real/cwd", 4096) = 14
setns(3, CLONE_NEWNS) = 0
getcwd("/", 4096) = 2
In the whole strace output there are no calls to chdir() whatsoever, so
I decided to look into the kernel source to see what else could change
directories and found this[1]:
/* Update the pwd and root */
set_fs_pwd(fs, &root);
set_fs_root(fs, &root);
The set_fs_pwd() call is roughly equivalent to a chdir() syscall and
this is called when the setns() syscall is invoked[2].
[1]: b14ffae378/fs/namespace.c (L4659)
[2]: b14ffae378/kernel/nsproxy.c (L346)
Impure derivations are derivations that can produce a different result
every time they're built. Example:
stdenv.mkDerivation {
name = "impure";
__impure = true; # marks this derivation as impure
outputHashAlgo = "sha256";
outputHashMode = "recursive";
buildCommand = "date > $out";
};
Some important characteristics:
* This requires the 'impure-derivations' experimental feature.
* Impure derivations are not "cached". Thus, running "nix-build" on
the example above multiple times will cause a rebuild every time.
* They are implemented similar to CA derivations, i.e. the output is
moved to a content-addressed path in the store. The difference is
that we don't register a realisation in the Nix database.
* Pure derivations are not allowed to depend on impure derivations. In
the future fixed-output derivations will be allowed to depend on
impure derivations, thus forming an "impurity barrier" in the
dependency graph.
* When sandboxing is enabled, impure derivations can access the
network in the same way as fixed-output derivations. In relaxed
sandboxing mode, they can access the local filesystem.
The return value of BaseError::addTrace(...) is never used and
error-prone as subclasses calling it will return a BaseError instead of
the subclass.
This commit changes its return value to be void.
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.
Rather than having four different but very similar types of hashes, make
only one, with a tag indicating whether it corresponds to a regular of
deferred derivation.
This implies a slight logical change: The original Nix+multiple-outputs
model assumed only one hash-modulo per derivation. Adding
multiple-outputs CA derivations changed this as these have one
hash-modulo per output. This change is now treating each derivation as
having one hash modulo per output.
This obviously means that we internally loose the guaranty that
all the outputs of input-addressed derivations have the same hash
modulo. But it turns out that it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing
in the code taking advantage of that fact (and it probably shouldn’t
anyways).
The upside is that it is now much easier to work with these hashes, and
we can get rid of a lot of useless `std::visit{ overloaded`.
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <John.Ericson@Obsidian.Systems>
