the DerivationGoal runs. Otherwise, if a goal is a top-level goal,
then the lock won't be released until nix-store finishes. With
--keep-going and lots of top-level goals, it's possible to run out
of file descriptors (this happened sometimes in the build farm for
Nixpkgs). Also, for failed derivation, it won't be possible to
build it again until the lock is released.
* Idem for locks on build users: these weren't released in a timely
manner for failed top-level derivation goals. So if there were more
than (say) 10 such failed builds, you would get an error about
having run out of build users.
scan for runtime dependencies (i.e. the local machine shouldn't do a
scan that the remote machine has already done). Also pipe directly
into `nix-store --import': don't use a temporary file.
(e.g. an SSH connection problem) and permanent failures (i.e. the
builder failed). This matters to Hydra (it wants to know whether it
makes sense to retry a build).
closure of the inputs. This really enforces that there can't be any
undeclared dependencies on paths in the store. This is done by
creating a fake Nix store and creating bind-mounts or hard-links in
the fake store for all paths in the closure. After the build, the
build output is moved from the fake store to the real store. TODO:
the chroot has to be on the same filesystem as the Nix store for
this to work, but this isn't enforced yet. (I.e. it only works
currently if /tmp is on the same FS as /nix/store.)
bind-mounts we do are only visible to the builder process and its
children. So accidentally doing "rm -rf" on the chroot directory
won't wipe out /nix/store and other bind-mounted directories
anymore. Also, the bind-mounts in the private namespace disappear
automatically when the builder exits.
necessary that at least one build hook doesn't return "postpone",
otherwise nix-store will barf ("waiting for a build slot, yet there
are no running children"). So inform the build hook when this is
the case, so that it can start a build even when that would exceed
the maximum load on a machine.
SHA-256 outputs of fixed-output derivations. I.e. they now produce
the same store path:
$ nix-store --add x
/nix/store/j2fq9qxvvxgqymvpszhs773ncci45xsj-x
$ nix-store --add-fixed --recursive sha256 x
/nix/store/j2fq9qxvvxgqymvpszhs773ncci45xsj-x
the latter being the same as the path that a derivation
derivation {
name = "x";
outputHashAlgo = "sha256";
outputHashMode = "recursive";
outputHash = "...";
...
};
produces.
This does change the output path for such fixed-output derivations.
Fortunately they are quite rare. The most common use is fetchsvn
calls with SHA-256 hashes. (There are a handful of those is
Nixpkgs, mostly unstable development packages.)
* Documented the computation of store paths (in store-api.cc).
subtle and often hard-to-reproduce bugs where programs in pipes
either barf with a "Broken pipe" message or not, depending on the
exact timing conditions. This particularly happened in GNU M4 (and
Bison, which uses M4).
disasters involving `rm -rf' on bind mounts. Will try the
definitive fix (per-process mounts, apparently possible via the
CLONE_NEWNS flag in clone()) some other time.
accessed time of paths that may be deleted. Anything more recently
used won't be deleted. The time is specified in time_t,
e.g. seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC; use `date +%s' to
convert to time_t from the command line.
Example: to delete everything that hasn't been used in the last two
months:
$ nix-store --gc -v --max-atime $(date +%s -d "2 months ago")
order of ascending last access time. This is useful in conjunction
with --max-freed or --max-links to prefer deleting non-recently used
garbage, which is good (especially in the build farm) since garbage
may become live again.
The code could easily be modified to accept other criteria for
ordering garbage by changing the comparison operator used by the
priority queue in collectGarbage().
particular, dietlibc cannot figure out the cwd because the inode of
the current directory doesn't appear in .. (because getdents returns
the inode of the mount point).
need /etc in the chroot (in particular, /etc/resolv.conf for
fetchurl). Not having /etc/resolv.conf in the chroot is a good
thing, since we don't want normal derivations to download files.
~/.nix-defexpr, otherwise the attribute cannot be selected with the
`-A' option. Useful if you want to stick a Nix expression directly
in ~/.nix-defexpr.
again. (After the previous substituter mechanism refactoring I
didn't update the code that obtains the references of substitutable
paths.) This required some refactoring: the substituter programs
are now kept running and receive/respond to info requests via
stdin/stdout.
bytes have been freed, `--max-links' to stop when the Nix store
directory has fewer than N hard links (the latter being important
for very large Nix stores on filesystems with a 32000 subdirectories
limit).
store under the reference relation, since that means that the
garbage collector will need a long time to start deleting paths.
Instead just delete the referrers of a path first.
This isn't usually a problem, except that it causes tests to fail
when performed in a directory with a very long path name. So chdir
to the socket directory and use a relative path name.
/tmp/nix-<pid>-<counter> for temporary build directories. This
increases purity a bit: many packages store the temporary build path
in their output, causing (generally unimportant) binary differences.
$ nix-env -e $(which firefox)
or
$ nix-env -e /nix/store/nywzlygrkfcgz7dfmhm5xixlx1l0m60v-pan-0.132
* nix-env -i: if an argument contains a slash anywhere, treat it as a
path and follow it through symlinks into the Nix store. This allows
things like
$ nix-build -A firefox
$ nix-env -i ./result
* nix-env -q/-i/-e: don't complain when the `*' selector doesn't match
anything. In particular, `nix-env -q \*' doesn't fail anymore on an
empty profile.
executed in a chroot that contains just the Nix store, the temporary
build directory, and a configurable set of additional directories
(/dev and /proc by default). This allows a bit more purity
enforcement: hidden build-time dependencies on directories such as
/usr or /nix/var/nix/profiles are no longer possible. As an added
benefit, accidental network downloads (cf. NIXPKGS-52) are prevented
as well (because files such as /etc/resolv.conf are not available in
the chroot).
However the usefulness of chroots is diminished by the fact that
many builders depend on /bin/sh, so you need /bin in the list of
additional directories. (And then on non-NixOS you need /lib as
well...)
usage by finding identical files in the store and hard-linking them
to each other. It typically reduces the size of the store by
something like 25-35%. This is what the optimise-store.pl script
did, but the new command is faster and more correct (it's safe wrt
garbage collection and concurrent builds).
(/nix/var/nix/daemon-socket). This allows access to the Nix daemon
to be restricted by setting the mode/ownership on that directory as
desired, e.g.
$ chmod 770 /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket
$ chown root.wheel /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket
to allow only users in the wheel group to use Nix.
Setting the ownership on a socket is much trickier, since the socket
must be deleted and recreated every time the daemon is started
(which would require additional Nix configuration file directives to
specify the mode/ownership, and wouldn't support arbitrary ACLs),
some BSD variants appear to ignore permissions on sockets, and it's
not clear whether the umask is respected on every platform when
creating sockets.
fixed-output derivations or substitutions try to build the same
store path at the same time. Locking generally catches this, but
not between multiple goals in the same process. This happened
especially often (actually, only) in the build farm with fetchurl
downloads of the same file being executed on multiple machines and
then copied back to the main machine where they would clobber each
other (NIXBF-13).
Solution: if a goal notices that the output path is already locked,
then go to sleep until another goal finishes (hopefully the one
locking the path) and try again.
need any info on substitutable paths, we just call the substituters
(such as download-using-manifests.pl) directly. This means that
it's no longer necessary for nix-pull to register substitutes or for
nix-channel to clear them, which makes those operations much faster
(NIX-95). Also, we don't have to worry about keeping nix-pull
manifests (in /nix/var/nix/manifests) and the database in sync with
each other.
The downside is that there is some overhead in calling an external
program to get the substitutes info. For instance, "nix-env -qas"
takes a bit longer.
Abolishing the substitutes table also makes the logic in
local-store.cc simpler, as we don't need to store info for invalid
paths. On the downside, you cannot do things like "nix-store -qR"
on a substitutable but invalid path (but nobody did that anyway).
* Never catch interrupts (the Interrupted exception).
