Following discussion with Shea and Graham. It's a big enough change
from the last release. Also, from a semver perspective, 2.0 makes more
sense because we did remove some interfaces (like nix-pull/nix-push).
For example,
$ nix-store -q --roots /nix/store/7phd2sav7068nivgvmj2vpm3v47fd27l-patchelf-0.8pre845_0315148
{temp:1}
denotes that the path is only being kept alive by a temporary root
(i.e. /nix/var/nix/temproots/). Similarly,
$ nix-store --gc --print-roots
...
{memory:9} -> /nix/store/094gpjn9f15ip17wzxhma4r51nvsj17p-curl-7.53.1
shows that curl is being used by some process.
Nix can now automatically run the garbage collector during builds or
while adding paths to the store. The option "min-free = <bytes>"
specifies that Nix should run the garbage collector whenever free
space in the Nix store drops below <bytes>. It will then delete
garbage until "max-free" bytes are available.
Garbage collection during builds is asynchronous; running builds are
not paused and new builds are not blocked. However, there also is a
synchronous GC run prior to the first build/substitution.
Currently, no old GC roots are deleted (as in "nix-collect-garbage
-d").
Since file locks are per-process rather than per-file-descriptor, the
garbage collector would always acquire a lock on its own temproots
file and conclude that it's stale.
Functions like copyClosure() had 3 bool arguments, which creates a
severe risk of mixing up arguments.
Also, implement copyClosure() using copyPaths().
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.
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.
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 is a convenience command to allow users who are not privileged to
create /nix/store to use Nix with regular binary caches. For example,
$ NIX_REMOTE="local?state=$HOME/nix/var&real=/$HOME/nix/store" nix run firefox bashInteractive
will download Firefox and bash from cache.nixos.org, then start a
shell in which $HOME/nix/store is mounted on /nix/store.
This is primarily to subsume the functionality of the
copy-from-other-stores substituter. For example, in the NixOS
installer, we can now do (assuming we're in the target chroot, and the
Nix store of the installation CD is bind-mounted on /tmp/nix):
$ nix-build ... --option substituters 'local?state=/tmp/nix/var&real=/tmp/nix/store'
However, unlike copy-from-other-stores, this also allows write access
to such a store. One application might be fetching substitutes for
/nix/store in a situation where the user doesn't have sufficient
privileges to create /nix, e.g.:
$ NIX_REMOTE="local?state=/home/alice/nix/var&real=/home/alice/nix/store" nix-build ...
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().
These are content-addressed paths or outputs of locally performed
builds. They are trusted even if they don't have signatures, so "nix
verify-paths" won't complain about them.
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.
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.)
Previously, to build a derivation remotely, we had to copy the entire
closure of the .drv file to the remote machine, even though we only
need the top-level derivation. This is very wasteful: the closure can
contain thousands of store paths, and in some Hydra use cases, include
source paths that are very large (e.g. Git/Mercurial checkouts).
So now there is a new operation, StoreAPI::buildDerivation(), that
performs a build from an in-memory representation of a derivation
(BasicDerivation) rather than from a on-disk .drv file. The only files
that need to be in the Nix store are the sources of the derivation
(drv.inputSrcs), and the needed output paths of the dependencies (as
described by drv.inputDrvs). "nix-store --serve" exposes this
interface.
Note that this is a privileged operation, because you can construct a
derivation that builds any store path whatsoever. Fixing this will
require changing the hashing scheme (i.e., the output paths should be
computed from the other fields in BasicDerivation, allowing them to be
verified without access to other derivations). However, this would be
quite nice because it would allow .drv-free building (e.g. "nix-env
-i" wouldn't have to write any .drv files to disk).
Fixes#173.
By preloading all inodes in the /nix/store/.links directory, we can
quickly determine of a hardlinked file was already linked to the hashed
links.
This is tolerant of removing the .links directory, it will simply
recalculate all hashes in the store.
The flag ‘--check’ to ‘nix-store -r’ or ‘nix-build’ will cause Nix to
redo the build of a derivation whose output paths are already valid.
If the new output differs from the original output, an error is
printed. This makes it easier to test if a build is deterministic.
(Obviously this cannot catch all sources of non-determinism, but it
catches the most common one, namely the current time.)
For example:
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A patchelf
...
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A patchelf --check
error: derivation `/nix/store/1ipvxsdnbhl1rw6siz6x92s7sc8nwkkb-patchelf-0.6' may not be deterministic: hash mismatch in output `/nix/store/4pc1dmw5xkwmc6q3gdc9i5nbjl4dkjpp-patchelf-0.6.drv'
The --check build fails if not all outputs are valid. Thus the first
call to nix-build is necessary to ensure that all outputs are valid.
The current outputs are left untouched: the new outputs are either put
in a chroot or diverted to a different location in the store using
hash rewriting.
For instance, it's pointless to keep copy-from-other-stores running if
there are no other stores, or download-using-manifests if there are no
manifests. This also speeds things up because we don't send queries
to those substituters.
It turns out that in multi-user Nix, a builder may be able to do
ln /etc/shadow $out/foo
Afterwards, canonicalisePathMetaData() will be applied to $out/foo,
causing /etc/shadow's mode to be set to 444 (readable by everybody but
writable by nobody). That's obviously Very Bad.
Fortunately, this fails in NixOS's default configuration because
/nix/store is a bind mount, so "ln" will fail with "Invalid
cross-device link". It also fails if hard-link restrictions are
enabled, so a workaround is:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/fs/protected_hardlinks
The solution is to check that all files in $out are owned by the build
user. This means that innocuous operations like "ln
${pkgs.foo}/some-file $out/" are now rejected, but that already failed
in chroot builds anyway.
So if a path is not garbage solely because it's reachable from a root
due to the gc-keep-outputs or gc-keep-derivations settings, ‘nix-store
-q --roots’ now shows that root.
But this time it's *obviously* correct! No more segfaults due to
infinite recursions for sure, etc.
Also, move directories to /nix/store/trash instead of renaming them to
/nix/store/bla-gc-<pid>. Then we can just delete /nix/store/trash at
the end.
With this flag, if any valid derivation output is missing or corrupt,
it will be recreated by using a substitute if available, or by
rebuilding the derivation. The latter may use hash rewriting if
chroots are not available.
This operation allows fixing corrupted or accidentally deleted store
paths by redownloading them using substituters, if available.
Since the corrupted path cannot be replaced atomically, there is a
very small time window (one system call) during which neither the old
(corrupted) nor the new (repaired) contents are available. So
repairing should be used with some care on critical packages like
Glibc.
It turns out that the immutable bit doesn't work all that well. A
better way is to make the entire Nix store a read-only bind mount,
i.e. by doing
$ mount --bind /nix/store /nix/store
$ mount -o remount,ro,bind /nix/store
(This would typically done in an early boot script, before anything
from /nix/store is used.)
Since Nix needs to be able to write to the Nix store, it now detects
if /nix/store is a read-only bind mount and then makes it writable in
a private mount namespace.
Incremental optimisation requires creating links in /nix/store/.links
to all files in the store. However, this means that if we delete a
store path, no files are actually deleted because links in
/nix/store/.links still exists. So we need to check /nix/store/.links
for files with a link count of 1 and delete them.
optimiseStore() now creates persistent, content-addressed hard links
in /nix/store/.links. For instance, if it encounters a file P with
hash H, it will create a hard link
P' = /nix/store/.link/<H>
to P if P' doesn't already exist; if P' exist, then P is replaced by a
hard link to P'. This is better than the previous in-memory map,
because it had the tendency to unnecessarily replace hard links with a
hard link to whatever happened to be the first file with a given hash
it encountered. It also allows on-the-fly, incremental optimisation.
To implement binary caches efficiently, Hydra needs to be able to map
the hash part of a store path (e.g. "gbg...zr7") to the full store
path (e.g. "/nix/store/gbg...kzr7-subversion-1.7.5"). (The binary
cache mechanism uses hash parts as a key for looking up store paths to
ensure privacy.) However, doing a search in the Nix store for
/nix/store/<hash>* is expensive since it requires reading the entire
directory. queryPathFromHashPart() prevents this by doing a cheap
database lookup.
queryValidPaths() combines multiple calls to isValidPath() in one.
This matters when using the Nix daemon because it reduces latency.
For instance, on "nix-env -qas \*" it reduces execution time from 5.7s
to 4.7s (which is indistinguishable from the non-daemon case).
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.
We can't open a SQLite database if the disk is full. Since this
prevents the garbage collector from running when it's most needed, we
reserve some dummy space that we can free just before doing a garbage
collection. This actually revives some old code from the Berkeley DB
days.
Fixes#27.
Make the garbage collector more concurrent by deleting valid paths
outside the region where we're holding the global GC lock. This
should greatly reduce the time during which new builds are blocked,
since the deletion accounts for the vast majority of the time spent in
the GC.
To ensure that this is safe, the valid paths are invalidated and
renamed to some arbitrary path while we're holding the lock. This
ensures that we when we finally delete the path, it's not a (newly)
valid or locked path.
