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.
Without this, substitute info is fetched sequentially, which is
superslow. In the old UI (e.g. nix-build), we call printMissing(),
which calls queryMissing(), thereby preheating the binary cache
cache. But the new UI doesn't do that.
In particular, drop the "build-" and "gc-" prefixes which are
pointless. So now you can say
nix build --no-sandbox
instead of
nix build --no-build-use-sandbox
This is useful for testing commands in isolation.
For example,
$ nix run nixpkgs.geeqie -i -k DISPLAY -k XAUTHORITY -c geeqie
runs geeqie in an empty environment, except for $DISPLAY and
$XAUTHORITY.
E.g.
nix run nixpkgs.hello -c hello --greeting Hallo
Note that unlike "nix-shell --command", no quoting of arguments is
necessary.
"-c" (short for "--command") cannot be combined with "--" because they
both consume all remaining arguments. But since installables shouldn't
start with a dash, this is unlikely to cause problems.
Running "nix run" with a diverted store, e.g.
$ nix run --store local?root=/tmp/nix nixpkgs.hello
stopped working when Nix became multithreaded, because
unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER) doesn't work in multithreaded processes. The
obvious solution is to terminate all other threads first, but 1) there
is no way to terminate Boehm GC marker threads; and 2) it appears that
the kernel has a race where unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER) will still fail for
some indeterminate amount of time after joining other threads.
So instead, "nix run" will now exec() a single-threaded helper ("nix
__run_in_chroot") that performs the actual unshare()/chroot()/exec().
Now that we use threads in lots of places, it's possible for
TunnelLogger::log() to be called asynchronously from other threads
than the main loop. So we need to ensure that STDERR_NEXT messages
don't clobber other messages.
Besides being unused, this function has a bug that it will incorrectly
decode the path component Ubuntu\04016.04.2\040LTS\040amd64 as
"Ubuntu.04.2 LTS amd64" instead of "Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS amd64".
This adds an argument "rev" specififying the Git commit hash. The
existing argument "rev" is renamed to "ref". The default value for
"ref" is "master". When specifying a hash, it's necessary to specify a
ref since we're not cloning the entire repository but only fetching a
specific ref.
Example usage:
builtins.fetchgit {
url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git;
ref = "release-16.03";
rev = "c1c0484041ab6f9c6858c8ade80a8477c9ae4442";
};
The package list is now cached in
~/.cache/nix/package-search.json. This gives a substantial speedup to
"nix search" queries. For example (on an SSD):
First run: (no package search cache, cold page cache)
$ time nix search blender
Attribute name: nixpkgs.blender
Package name: blender
Version: 2.78c
Description: 3D Creation/Animation/Publishing System
real 0m6.516s
Second run: (package search cache populated)
$ time nix search blender
Attribute name: nixpkgs.blender
Package name: blender
Version: 2.78c
Description: 3D Creation/Animation/Publishing System
real 0m0.143s
In particular, don't use base-64, which we don't support. (We do have
base-32 redirects for hysterical reasons.)
Also, add a test for the hashed mirror feature.
This doesn't work in read-only mode, ensuring that operations like
nix path-info --store https://cache.nixos.org -S nixpkgs.hello
(asking for the closure size of nixpkgs.hello in cache.nixos.org) work
when nixpkgs.hello doesn't exist in the local store.
On second though this was annoying. E.g. "nix log nixpkgs.hello" would
build/download Hello first, even though the log can be fetched
directly from the binary cache.
May need to revisit this.
This allows builds to call setuid binaries. This was previously
possible until we started using seccomp. Turns out that seccomp by
default disallows processes from acquiring new privileges. Generally,
any use of setuid binaries (except those created by the builder
itself) is by definition impure, but some people were relying on this
ability for certain tests.
Example:
$ nix build '(with import <nixpkgs> {}; runCommand "foo" {} "/run/wrappers/bin/ping -c 1 8.8.8.8; exit 1")' --no-allow-new-privileges
builder for ‘/nix/store/j0nd8kv85hd6r4kxgnwzvr0k65ykf6fv-foo.drv’ failed with exit code 1; last 2 log lines:
cannot raise the capability into the Ambient set
: Operation not permitted
$ nix build '(with import <nixpkgs> {}; runCommand "foo" {} "/run/wrappers/bin/ping -c 1 8.8.8.8; exit 1")' --allow-new-privileges
builder for ‘/nix/store/j0nd8kv85hd6r4kxgnwzvr0k65ykf6fv-foo.drv’ failed with exit code 1; last 6 log lines:
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=15.2 ms
Fixes#1429.
Functions like copyClosure() had 3 bool arguments, which creates a
severe risk of mixing up arguments.
Also, implement copyClosure() using copyPaths().
Jörg Thalheim