This closes#3026 by allowing `builtins.readFile` to read a file with a
wrongly reported file size, for example, files in `/proc` may report a
file size of 0. Reading file in `/proc` is not a good enough motivation,
however I do think it just makes nix more robust by allowing more file
to be read. Especially, I do considerer the previous behavior to be
dangerous because nix was previously reading truncated files. Examples
of file system which incorrectly report file size may be network file
system or dynamic file system (for performance reason, a dynamic file
system such as FUSE may generate the content of the file on demand).
```
nix-repl> builtins.readFile "/proc/version"
""
```
With this commit:
```
nix-repl> builtins.readFile "/proc/version"
"Linux version 5.6.7 (nixbld@localhost) (gcc version 9.3.0 (GCC)) #1-NixOS SMP Thu Apr 23 08:38:27 UTC 2020\n"
```
Here is a summary of the behavior changes:
- If the reported size is smaller, previous implementation
was silently returning a truncated file content. The new implementation
is returning the correct file content.
- If a file had a bigger reported file size, previous implementation was
failing with an exception, but the new implementation is returning the
correct file content. This change of behavior is coherent with this pull
request.
Open questions
- The behavior is unchanged for correctly reported file size, however
performances may vary because it uses the more complex sink interface.
Considering that sink is used a lot, I don't think this impacts the
performance a lot.
- `builtins.readFile` on an infinite file, such as `/dev/random` may
fill the memory.
- it does not support adding file to store, such as `${/proc/version}`.
In particular, doing 'nix build /path/to/dir' now works if
/path/to/dir is not a Git tree (it only has to contain a flake.nix
file).
Also, 'nix flake init' no longer requires a Git tree (but it will do a
'git add flake.nix' if it's a Git tree)
Suppose I have a path /nix/store/[hash]-[name]/a/a/a/a/a/[...]/a,
long enough that everything after "/nix/store/" is longer than 4096
(MAX_PATH) bytes.
Nix will happily allow such a path to be inserted into the store,
because it doesn't look at all the nested structure. It just cares
about the /nix/store/[hash]-[name] part. But, when the path is deleted,
we encounter a problem. Nix will move the path to /nix/store/trash, but
then when it's trying to recursively delete the trash directory, it will
at some point try to unlink
/nix/store/trash/[hash]-[name]/a/a/a/a/a/[...]/a. This will fail,
because the path is too long. After this has failed, any store deletion
operation will never work again, because Nix needs to delete the trash
directory before recreating it to move new things to it. (I assume this
is because otherwise a path being deleted could already exist in the
trash, and then moving it would fail.)
This means that if I can trick somebody into just fetching a tarball
containing a path of the right length, they won't be able to delete
store paths or garbage collect ever again, until the offending path is
manually removed from /nix/store/trash. (And even fixing this manually
is quite difficult if you don't understand the issue, because the
absolute path that Nix says it failed to remove is also too long for
rm(1).)
This patch fixes the issue by making Nix's recursive delete operation
use unlinkat(2). This function takes a relative path and a directory
file descriptor. We ensure that the relative path is always just the
name of the directory entry, and therefore its length will never exceed
255 bytes. This means that it will never even come close to AX_PATH,
and Nix will therefore be able to handle removing arbitrarily deep
directory hierachies.
Since the directory file descriptor is used for recursion after being
used in readDirectory, I made a variant of readDirectory that takes an
already open directory stream, to avoid the directory being opened
multiple times. As we have seen from this issue, the less we have to
interact with paths, the better, and so it's good to reuse file
descriptors where possible.
I left _deletePath as succeeding even if the parent directory doesn't
exist, even though that feels wrong to me, because without that early
return, the linux-sandbox test failed.
Reported-by: Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>
Thanks-to: Puck Meerburg <puck@puckipedia.com>
Tested-by: Puck Meerburg <puck@puckipedia.com>
Reviewed-by: Puck Meerburg <puck@puckipedia.com>
Reduces the number of store queries it performs. Also prints a warning
if any of the selectors did not match any installed derivations.
UX Caveats:
- Will print a warning that nothing matched if a previous selector
already removed the path
- Will not do anything if no selectors were provided (no change from
before).
Fixes#3531
In particular, we store whether an attribute failed to evaluate (threw
an exception) or was an unsupported type. This is to ensure that a
repeated 'nix flake show' never has to evaluate anything, so it can
execute without fetching the flake.
With this, 'nix flake show nixpkgs/nixos-20.03 --legacy' executes in
0.6s (was 3.4s).
This speeds up the creation of the cache for the nixpkgs flake from
21.2s to 10.2s. Oddly, it also speeds up querying the cache
(i.e. running 'nix flake show nixpkgs/nixos-20.03 --legacy') from 4.2s
to 3.4s.
(For comparison, running with --no-eval-cache takes 9.5s, so the
overhead of building the SQLite cache is only 0.7s.)
In the fully cached case for the 'nixpkgs' flake, it went from 101s to
4.6s. Populating the cache went from 132s to 17.4s (which could
probably be improved further by combining INSERTs).
Alyssa Ross
Linus Heckemann