mode. Presumably nix-worker would be setuid to the Nix store user.
The worker performs all operations on the Nix store and database, so
the caller can be completely unprivileged.
This is already much more secure than the old setuid scheme, since
the worker doesn't need to do Nix expression evaluation and so on.
Most importantly, this means that it doesn't need to access any user
files, with all resulting security risks; it only performs pure
store operations.
Once this works, it is easy to move to a daemon model that forks off
a worker for connections established through a Unix domain socket.
That would be even more secure.
* Some refactoring: put the NAR archive integer/string serialisation
code in a separate file so it can be reused by the worker protocol
implementation.
containing functions that operate on the Nix store. One
implementation is LocalStore, which operates on the Nix store
directly. The next step, to enable secure multi-user Nix, is to
create a different implementation RemoteStore that talks to a
privileged daemon process that uses LocalStore to perform the actual
operations.
Rather, setuid support is now always compiled in (at least on
platforms that have the setresuid system call, e.g., Linux and
FreeBSD), but it must enabled by chowning/chmodding the Nix
binaries.
gives a huge speedup in operations that read or write from standard
input/output. (So libstdc++'s I/O isn't that bad, you just have to
call std::ios::sync_with_stdio(false).) For instance, `nix-store
--register-substitutes' went from 1.4 seconds to 0.1 seconds on a
certain input. Another victory for Valgrind.
graph to be passed to a builder. This attribute should be a list of
pairs [name1 path1 name2 path2 ...]. The references graph of each
`pathN' will be stored in a text file `nameN' in the temporary build
directory. The text files have the format used by `nix-store
--register-validity'. However, the deriver fields are left empty.
`exportReferencesGraph' is useful for builders that want to do
something with the closure of a store path. Examples: the builders
that make initrds and ISO images for NixOS.
`exportReferencesGraph' is entirely pure. It's necessary because
otherwise the only way for a builder to get this information would
be to call `nix-store' directly, which is not allowed (though
unfortunately possible).
available. For instance,
$ nix-store -l $(which svn) | less
lets you read the build log of the Subversion instance in your
profile.
* `nix-store -qb': if applied to a non-derivation, take the deriver.
check that the references of the output of a derivation are in the
specified set. For instance,
allowedReferences = [];
specifies that the output cannot have any references. (This is
useful, for instance, for the generation of bootstrap binaries for
stdenv-linux, which must not have any references for purity). It
could also be used to guard against undesired runtime dependencies,
e.g.,
{gcc, dynlib}: derivation {
...
allowedReferences = [dynlib];
}
says that the output can refer to the path of `dynlib' but not
`gcc'. A `forbiddedReferences' attribute would be more useful for
this, though.
concatenation and string coercion. This was a big mess (see
e.g. NIX-67). Contexts are now folded into strings, so that they
don't cause evaluation errors when they're not expected. The
semantics of paths has been clarified (see nixexpr-ast.def).
toString() and coerceToString() have been merged.
Semantic change: paths are now copied to the store when they're in a
concatenation (and in most other situations - that's the
formalisation of the meaning of a path). So
"foo " + ./bla
evaluates to "foo /nix/store/hash...-bla", not "foo
/path/to/current-dir/bla". This prevents accidental impurities, and
is more consistent with the treatment of derivation outputs, e.g.,
`"foo " + bla' where `bla' is a derivation. (Here `bla' would be
replaced by the output path of `bla'.)
side should be a path, I guess.
* Handle paths that are in the store but not direct children of the
store directory.
* Ugh, hack to prevent double context wrapping.
attribute existence and to return an attribute from an attribute
set, respectively. Example: `hasAttr "foo" {foo = 1;}'. They
differ from the `?' and `.' operators in that the attribute name is
an arbitrary expression. (NIX-61)
Nix-env failed to call addPermRoot(), which is necessary to safely
add a new root. So if nix-env started after and finished before the
garbage collector, the user environment (plus all other new stuff)
it built might be garbage collected, leading to a dangling symlink
chain in ~/.nix-profile...
* Be more explicit if we block on the GC lock ("waiting for the big
garbage collector lock...").
* Don't loop trying to create a new generation. It's not necessary
anymore since profiles are locked nowadays.
and returns its path. This can be used to (for instance) write
builders inside a Nix expression, e.g.,
stdenv.mkDerivation {
builder = "
source $stdenv/setup
...
";
...
}
derivation attributes to flatten them into strings. This is
possible since string can nowadays be wrapped in contexts that
describe the derivations/sources referenced by the evaluation of the
string.
all the primops. This allows Nix expressions to test for new
primops and take appropriate action if they're not available. For
instance, rather than calling a primop `foo' directly, they could
say `if builtins ? foo then builtins.foo ... else ...'.
writable. File permissions on Cygwin are rather complex, and in this
case this check introduced a problem with build jobs invoke from
outside of Cygwin (MSYS). It seemed almost impossible to fix the
permissions of the directory, so for now this safety check is disabled
on Cygwin.
https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/repos/trace/buildfarm-control/trunk/ext/nix/,
with some modifications. This allows `nix-env -qa' to show the
attribute path that can be used to unambiguously install a package
using `nix-env -i -A'. Example:
$ nix-env -f top-level/all-packages.nix -qaA subversion xorg-server
subversionWithJava subversion-1.2.3
subversion subversion-1.3.2
subversion14 subversion-1.4.0pre-rc1
xorg.xorgserver xorg-server-1.1.0
e.g.,
$ nix-env -i -A subversion xorg.xorgserver
The main advantage over using symbolic names is that using attribute
names is unambiguous and much, much faster.
argument has a valid value, i.e., is in a certain domain. E.g.,
{ foo : [true false]
, bar : ["a" "b" "c"]
}: ...
This previously could be done using assertions, but domain checks
will allow the buildfarm to automatically extract the configuration
space from functions.
"--with-freetype2-library=" + freetype + "/lib"
can now be written as
"--with-freetype2-library=${freetype}/lib"
An arbitrary expression can be enclosed within ${...}, not just
identifiers.
* Escaping in string literals: \n, \r, \t interpreted as in C, any
other character following \ is interpreted as-is.
* Newlines are now allowed in string literals.
packages (provided that they have a `meta.description' attribute).
E.g.,
$ ./src/nix-env/nix-env -qa --description gcc
gcc-4.0.2 GNU Compiler Collection, 4.0.x (cross-compiler for sparc-linux)
gcc-4.0.2 GNU Compiler Collection, 4.0.x (cross-compiler for mips-linux)
gcc-4.0.2 GNU Compiler Collection, 4.0.x (cross-compiler for arm-linux)
gcc-4.0.2 GNU Compiler Collection, 4.0.x
to be queried, e.g., `nix-env -qa firefox'. This does require the
argument '*' to be passed if one wants information about all
derivations, so the old `nix-env -qa' now is `nix-env -qa "*"'.
instantiation, e.g. "nix-env -i" and "nix-env -qas" (but not
"nix-env -qa"). It turns out that many redundant calls to
addToStore(path) were made, which reads and hashes the entire path.
For instance, the bash bootstrap binary in Nixpkgs would be read and
hashed many times. As a result nix-env would spend around 92% of
its time in the function sha256_block (according to callgrind).
Some simple memoization fixes this.
expressions that cause an assertion failure (like `assert system ==
"i686-linux"'). This allows all-packages.nix in Nixpkgs to be used
on all platforms, even if some Nix expressions don't work on all
platforms.
Not sure if this is a good idea; it's a bit hacky. In particular,
due to laziness some derivations might appear in `nix-env -qa' but
disappear in `nix-env -qas' or `nix-env -i'.
Commit 5000!
with the same name *and* version number, and pick the first one
(this means that the order in which channels appear in
~/.nix-channels matters). E.g.:
$ nix-env ii aterm
warning: there are multiple derivations named `aterm-2.4.2'; using the first one
installing `aterm-2.4.2'
the disk is full (because to delete something from the Nix store, we
need a Berkeley DB transaction, which takes up disk space). Under
normal operation, we make sure that there exists a file
/nix/var/nix/db/reserved of 1 MB. When running the garbage
collector, we delete that file before we open the Berkeley DB
environment.
implementations of MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256. The main benefit is that
we get assembler-optimised implementations of MD5 and SHA-1 (though
not SHA-256 (at least on x86), unfortunately). OpenSSL's SHA-1
implementation on Intel is twice as fast as ours.
derivation(s) we're interested, e.g.,
$ nix-instantiate ./all-packages.nix --attr xlibs.libX11
List elements can also be selected:
$ nix-instantiate ./build-for-release.nix --attr 0.subversion
This allows a non-ambiguous specification of a derivation. Of
course, this should also be added to nix-env and nix-build.
