in parallel. Hooks are more efficient: locks on output paths are
only acquired when the hook says that it is willing to accept a
build job. Hooks now work in two phases. First, they should first
tell Nix whether they are willing to accept a job. Nix guarantuees
that no two hooks will ever be in the first phase at the same time
(this simplifies the implementation of hooks, since they don't have
to perform locking (?)). Second, if they accept a job, they are
then responsible for building it (on the remote system), and copying
the result back. These can be run in parallel with other hooks and
locally executed jobs.
The implementation is a bit messy right now, though.
* The directory `distributed' shows a (hacky) example of a hook that
distributes build jobs over a set of machines listed in a
configuration file.
distributing a build action to another machine. In particular, the
paths in the input closures, the output paths, and successor mapping
for sub-derivations.
parallel as possible (similar to GNU Make's `-j' switch). This is
useful on SMP systems, but it is especially useful for doing builds
on multiple machines. The idea is that a large derivation is
initiated on one master machine, which then distributes
sub-derivations to any number of slave machines. This should not
happen synchronously or in lock-step, so the master must be capable
of dealing with multiple parallel build jobs. We now have the
infrastructure to support this.
TODO: substitutes are currently broken.
builders to point to the store and the temporary build directory,
respectively. Useful for purity checking.
* Also set TEMPDIR, TMPDIR, TEMP, and TEMP to NIX_BUILD_TOP to make
sure that tools in the builder store temporary files in the right
location.
Nix. This is to prevent Berkeley DB from becoming wedged.
Unfortunately it is not possible to throw C++ exceptions from a
signal handler. In fact, you can't do much of anything except
change variables of type `volatile sig_atomic_t'. So we set an
interrupt flag in the signal handler and check it at various
strategic locations in the code (by calling checkInterrupt()).
Since this is unlikely to cover all cases (e.g., (semi-)infinite
loops), sometimes SIGTERM may now be required to kill Nix.
