For the "stdenv accidentally referring to bootstrap-tools", it seems
easier to specify the path that we don't want to depend on, e.g.
disallowedRequisites = [ bootstrapTools ];
It turns out that using clone() to start a child process is unsafe in
a multithreaded program. It can cause the initialisation of a build
child process to hang in setgroups(), as seen several times in the
build farm:
The reason is that Glibc thinks that the other threads of the parent
exist in the child, so in setxid_mark_thread() it tries to get a futex
that has been acquired by another thread just before the clone(). With
fork(), Glibc runs pthread_atfork() handlers that take care of this
(in particular, __reclaim_stacks()). But clone() doesn't do that.
Fortunately, we can use fork()+unshare() instead of clone() to set up
private namespaces.
See also https://www.mail-archive.com/lxc-devel@lists.linuxcontainers.org/msg03434.html.
The Nixpkgs stdenv prints some custom escape sequences to denote
nesting and stuff like that. Most terminals (e.g. xterm, konsole)
ignore them, but some do not (e.g. xfce4-terminal). So for the benefit
of the latter, filter them out.
If a root is a regular file, then its name must denote a store
path. For instance, the existence of the file
/nix/var/nix/gcroots/per-user/eelco/hydra-roots/wzc3cy1wwwd6d0dgxpa77ijr1yp50s6v-libxml2-2.7.7
would cause
/nix/store/wzc3cy1wwwd6d0dgxpa77ijr1yp50s6v-libxml2-2.7.7
to be a root.
This is useful because it involves less I/O (no need for a readlink()
call) and takes up less disk space (the symlink target typically takes
up a full disk block, while directory entries are packed more
efficiently). This is particularly important for hydra.nixos.org,
which has hundreds of thousands of roots, and where reading the roots
can take 25 minutes.
‘trusted-users’ is a list of users and groups that have elevated
rights, such as the ability to specify binary caches. It defaults to
‘root’. A typical value would be ‘@wheel’ to specify all users in the
wheel group.
‘allowed-users’ is a list of users and groups that are allowed to
connect to the daemon. It defaults to ‘*’. A typical value would be
‘@users’ to specify the ‘users’ group.
When running NixOps under Mac OS X, we need to be able to import store
paths built on Linux into the local Nix store. However, HFS+ is
usually case-insensitive, so if there are directories with file names
that differ only in case, then importing will fail.
The solution is to add a suffix ("~nix~case~hack~<integer>") to
colliding files. For instance, if we have a directory containing
xt_CONNMARK.h and xt_connmark.h, then the latter will be renamed to
"xt_connmark.h~nix~case~hack~1". If a store path is dumped as a NAR,
the suffixes are removed. Thus, importing and exporting via a
case-insensitive Nix store is round-tripping. So when NixOps calls
nix-copy-closure to copy the path to a Linux machine, you get the
original file names back.
Closes#119.
This makes things more efficient (we don't need to use an SSH master
connection, and we only start a single remote process) and gets rid of
locking issues (the remote nix-store process will keep inputs and
outputs locked as long as they're needed).
It also makes it more or less secure to connect directly to the root
account on the build machine, using a forced command
(e.g. ‘command="nix-store --serve --write"’). This bypasses the Nix
daemon and is therefore more efficient.
Also, don't call nix-store to import the output paths.
When copying a large path causes the daemon to run out of memory, you
now get:
error: Nix daemon out of memory
instead of:
error: writing to file: Broken pipe
If a build log is not available locally, then ‘nix-store -l’ will now
try to download it from the servers listed in the ‘log-servers’ option
in nix.conf. For instance, if you have:
log-servers = http://hydra.nixos.org/log
then it will try to get logs from http://hydra.nixos.org/log/<base
name of the store path>. So you can do things like:
$ nix-store -l $(which xterm)
and get a log even if xterm wasn't built locally.
By preloading all inodes in the /nix/store/.links directory, we can
quickly determine of a hardlinked file was already linked to the hashed
links.
This is tolerant of removing the .links directory, it will simply
recalculate all hashes in the store.
If an inode in the Nix store has more than 1 link, it probably means that it was linked into .links/ by us. If so, skip.
There's a possibility that something else hardlinked the file, so it would be nice to be able to override this.
Also, by looking at the number of hardlinks for each of the files in .links/, you can get deduplication numbers and space savings.
While running Python 3’s test suite, we noticed that on some systems
/dev/pts/ptmx is created with permissions 0 (that’s the case with my
Nixpkgs-originating 3.0.43 kernel, but someone with a Debian-originating
3.10-3 reported not having this problem.)
There’s still the problem that people without
CONFIG_DEVPTS_MULTIPLE_INSTANCES=y are screwed (as noted in build.cc),
but I don’t see how we could work around it.
Since the addition of build-max-log-size, a call to
handleChildOutput() can result in cancellation of a goal. This
invalidated the "j" iterator in the waitForInput() loop, even though
it was still used afterwards. Likewise for the maxSilentTime
handling.
Probably fixes#231. At least it gets rid of the valgrind warnings.
The daemon now creates /dev deterministically (thanks!). However, it
expects /dev/kvm to be present.
The patch below restricts that requirement (1) to Linux-based systems,
and (2) to systems where /dev/kvm already exists.
I’m not sure about the way to handle (2). We could special-case
/dev/kvm and create it (instead of bind-mounting it) in the chroot, so
it’s always available; however, it wouldn’t help much since most likely,
if /dev/kvm missing, then KVM support is missing.
We were relying on SubstitutionGoal's destructor releasing the lock,
but if a goal is a top-level goal, the destructor won't run in a
timely manner since its reference count won't drop to zero. So
release it explicitly.
Fixes#178.
The flag ‘--check’ to ‘nix-store -r’ or ‘nix-build’ will cause Nix to
redo the build of a derivation whose output paths are already valid.
If the new output differs from the original output, an error is
printed. This makes it easier to test if a build is deterministic.
(Obviously this cannot catch all sources of non-determinism, but it
catches the most common one, namely the current time.)
For example:
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A patchelf
...
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A patchelf --check
error: derivation `/nix/store/1ipvxsdnbhl1rw6siz6x92s7sc8nwkkb-patchelf-0.6' may not be deterministic: hash mismatch in output `/nix/store/4pc1dmw5xkwmc6q3gdc9i5nbjl4dkjpp-patchelf-0.6.drv'
The --check build fails if not all outputs are valid. Thus the first
call to nix-build is necessary to ensure that all outputs are valid.
The current outputs are left untouched: the new outputs are either put
in a chroot or diverted to a different location in the store using
hash rewriting.
This substituter connects to a remote host, runs nix-store --serve
there, and then forwards substituter commands on to the remote host and
sends their results to the calling program. The ssh-substituter-hosts
option can be specified as a list of hosts to try.
This is an initial implementation and, while it works, it has some
limitations:
* Only the first host is used
* There is no caching of query results (all queries are sent to the
remote machine)
* There is no informative output (such as progress bars)
* Some failure modes may cause unhelpful error messages
* There is no concept of trusted-ssh-substituter-hosts
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
nix-store --export takes a tmproot, which can only release by exiting.
Substituters don't currently work in a way that could take advantage of
the looping, anyway.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
This is essentially the substituter API operating on the local store,
which will be used by the ssh substituter. It runs in a loop rather than
just taking one command so that in the future nix will be able to keep
one connection open for multiple instances of the substituter.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
Namely:
nix-store: derivations.cc:242: nix::Hash nix::hashDerivationModulo(nix::StoreAPI&, nix::Derivation): Assertion `store.isValidPath(i->first)' failed.
This happened because of the derivation output correctness check being
applied before the references of a derivation are valid.
*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*
So since commit 22144afa8d, Nix hasn't
actually checked whether the content of a downloaded NAR matches the
hash specified in the manifest / NAR info file. Urghhh...
In particular "libutil" was always a problem because it collides with
Glibc's libutil. Even if we install into $(libdir)/nix, the linker
sometimes got confused (e.g. if a program links against libstore but
not libutil, then ld would report undefined symbols in libstore
because it was looking at Glibc's libutil).
Note that adding --show-trace prevents functions calls from being
tail-recursive, so an expression that evaluates without --show-trace
may fail with a stack overflow if --show-trace is given.
I.e. "nix-store -q --roots" will now show (for example)
/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/result
rather than
/nix/var/nix/gcroots/auto/53222qsppi12s2hkap8dm2lg8xhhyk6v
There is no risk of getting an inconsistent result here: if the ID
returned by queryValidPathId() is deleted from the database
concurrently, subsequent queries involving that ID will simply fail
(since IDs are never reused).
In the Hydra build farm we fairly regularly get SQLITE_PROTOCOL errors
(e.g., "querying path in database: locking protocol"). The docs for
this error code say that it "is returned if some other process is
messing with file locks and has violated the file locking protocol
that SQLite uses on its rollback journal files." However, the SQLite
source code reveals that this error can also occur under high load:
if( cnt>5 ){
int nDelay = 1; /* Pause time in microseconds */
if( cnt>100 ){
VVA_ONLY( pWal->lockError = 1; )
return SQLITE_PROTOCOL;
}
if( cnt>=10 ) nDelay = (cnt-9)*238; /* Max delay 21ms. Total delay 996ms */
sqlite3OsSleep(pWal->pVfs, nDelay);
}
i.e. if certain locks cannot be not acquired, SQLite will retry a
number of times before giving up and returing SQLITE_PROTOCOL. The
comments say:
Circumstances that cause a RETRY should only last for the briefest
instances of time. No I/O or other system calls are done while the
locks are held, so the locks should not be held for very long. But
if we are unlucky, another process that is holding a lock might get
paged out or take a page-fault that is time-consuming to resolve,
during the few nanoseconds that it is holding the lock. In that case,
it might take longer than normal for the lock to free.
...
The total delay time before giving up is less than 1 second.
On a heavily loaded machine like lucifer (the main Hydra server),
which often has dozens of processes waiting for I/O, it seems to me
that a page fault could easily take more than a second to resolve.
So, let's treat SQLITE_PROTOCOL as SQLITE_BUSY and retry the
transaction.
Issue NixOS/hydra#14.
As discovered by Todd Veldhuizen, the shell started by nix-shell has
its affinity set to a single CPU. This is because nix-shell connects
to the Nix daemon, which causes the affinity hack to be applied. So
we turn this off for Perl programs.
On Linux, Nix can build i686 packages even on x86_64 systems. It's not
enough to recognize this situation by settings.thisSystem, we also have
to consult uname(). E.g. we can be running on a i686 Debian with an
amd64 kernel. In that situation settings.thisSystem is i686-linux, but
we still need to change personality to i686 to make builds consistent.
On a system with multiple CPUs, running Nix operations through the
daemon is significantly slower than "direct" mode:
$ NIX_REMOTE= nix-instantiate '<nixos>' -A system
real 0m0.974s
user 0m0.875s
sys 0m0.088s
$ NIX_REMOTE=daemon nix-instantiate '<nixos>' -A system
real 0m2.118s
user 0m1.463s
sys 0m0.218s
The main reason seems to be that the client and the worker get moved
to a different CPU after every call to the worker. This patch adds a
hack to lock them to the same CPU. With this, the overhead of going
through the daemon is very small:
$ NIX_REMOTE=daemon nix-instantiate '<nixos>' -A system
real 0m1.074s
user 0m0.809s
sys 0m0.098s
This reverts commit 69b8f9980f.
The timeout should be enforced remotely. Otherwise, if the garbage
collector is running either locally or remotely, if will block the
build or closure copying for some time. If the garbage collector
takes too long, the build may time out, which is not what we want.
Also, on heavily loaded systems, copying large paths to and from the
remote machine can take a long time, also potentially resulting in a
timeout.
mount(2) with MS_BIND allows mounting a regular file on top of a regular
file, so there's no reason to only bind directories. This allows finer
control over just which files are and aren't included in the chroot
without having to build symlink trees or the like.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
With C++ std::map, doing a comparison like ‘map["foo"] == ...’ has the
side-effect of adding a mapping from "foo" to the empty string if
"foo" doesn't exist in the map. So we ended up setting some
environment variables by accident.
In particular this means that "trivial" derivations such as writeText
are not substituted, reducing the number of GET requests to the binary
cache by about 200 on a typical NixOS configuration.
This substituter basically cannot work reliably since we switched to
SQLite, since SQLite databases may need write access to open them even
just for reading (and in WAL mode they always do).
For instance, it's pointless to keep copy-from-other-stores running if
there are no other stores, or download-using-manifests if there are no
manifests. This also speeds things up because we don't send queries
to those substituters.
Before calling dumpPath(), we have to make sure the files are owned by
the build user. Otherwise, the build could contain a hard link to
(say) /etc/shadow, which would then be read by the daemon and
rewritten as a world-readable file.
This only affects systems that don't have hard link restrictions
enabled.
The assertion in canonicalisePathMetaData() failed because the
ownership of the path already changed due to the hash rewriting. The
solution is not to check the ownership of rewritten paths.
Issue #122.
Otherwise subsequent invocations of "--repair" will keep rebuilding
the path. This only happens if the path content differs between
builds (e.g. due to timestamps).
Don't pass --timeout / --max-silent-time to the remote builder.
Instead, let the local Nix process terminate the build if it exceeds a
timeout. The remote builder will be killed as a side-effect. This
gives better error reporting (since the timeout message from the
remote side wasn't properly propagated) and handles non-Nix problems
like SSH hangs.
I'm not sure if it has ever worked correctly. The line "lastWait =
after;" seems to mean that the timer was reset every time a build
produced log output.
Note that the timeout is now per build, as documented ("the maximum
number of seconds that a builder can run").
It is surprisingly impossible to check if a mountpoint is a bind mount
on Linux, and in my previous commit I forgot to check if /nix/store was
even a mountpoint at all. statvfs.f_flag is not populated with MS_BIND
(and even if it were, my check was wrong in the previous commit).
Luckily, the semantics of mount with MS_REMOUNT | MS_BIND make both
checks unnecessary: if /nix/store is not a mountpoint, then mount will
fail with EINVAL, and if /nix/store is not a bind-mount, then it will
not be made writable. Thus, if /nix/store is not a mountpoint, we fail
immediately (since we don't know how to make it writable), and if
/nix/store IS a mountpoint but not a bind-mount, we fail at first write
(see below for why we can't check and fail immediately).
Note that, due to what is IMO buggy behavior in Linux, calling mount
with MS_REMOUNT | MS_BIND on a non-bind readonly mount makes the
mountpoint appear writable in two places: In the sixth (but not the
10th!) column of mountinfo, and in the f_flags member of struct statfs.
All other syscalls behave as if the mount point were still readonly (at
least for Linux 3.9-rc1, but I don't think this has changed recently or
is expected to soon). My preferred semantics would be for MS_REMOUNT |
MS_BIND to fail on a non-bind mount, as it doesn't make sense to remount
a non bind-mount as a bind mount.
/nix/store could be a read-only bind mount even if it is / in its own filesystem, so checking the 4th field in mountinfo is insufficient.
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
It turns out that in multi-user Nix, a builder may be able to do
ln /etc/shadow $out/foo
Afterwards, canonicalisePathMetaData() will be applied to $out/foo,
causing /etc/shadow's mode to be set to 444 (readable by everybody but
writable by nobody). That's obviously Very Bad.
Fortunately, this fails in NixOS's default configuration because
/nix/store is a bind mount, so "ln" will fail with "Invalid
cross-device link". It also fails if hard-link restrictions are
enabled, so a workaround is:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/fs/protected_hardlinks
The solution is to check that all files in $out are owned by the build
user. This means that innocuous operations like "ln
${pkgs.foo}/some-file $out/" are now rejected, but that already failed
in chroot builds anyway.
...where <XX> is the first two characters of the derivation.
Otherwise /nix/var/log/nix/drvs may become so large that we run into
all sorts of weird filesystem limits/inefficiences. For instance,
ext3/ext4 filesystems will barf with "ext4_dx_add_entry:1551:
Directory index full!" once you hit a few million files.
So if a path is not garbage solely because it's reachable from a root
due to the gc-keep-outputs or gc-keep-derivations settings, ‘nix-store
-q --roots’ now shows that root.
But this time it's *obviously* correct! No more segfaults due to
infinite recursions for sure, etc.
Also, move directories to /nix/store/trash instead of renaming them to
/nix/store/bla-gc-<pid>. Then we can just delete /nix/store/trash at
the end.
This prevents zillions of derivations from being kept, and fixes an
infinite recursion in the garbage collector (due to an obscure cycle
that can occur with fixed-output derivations).
The integer constant ‘langVersion’ denotes the current language
version. It gets increased every time a language feature is
added/changed/removed. It's currently 1.
The string constant ‘nixVersion’ contains the current Nix version,
e.g. "1.2pre2980_9de6bc5".
If a derivation has multiple outputs, then we only want to download
those outputs that are actuallty needed. So if we do "nix-build -A
openssl.man", then only the "man" output should be downloaded.
Likewise if another package depends on ${openssl.man}.
The tricky part is that different derivations can depend on different
outputs of a given derivation, so we may need to restart the
corresponding derivation goal if that happens.
For example, given a derivation with outputs "out", "man" and "bin":
$ nix-build -A pkg
produces ./result pointing to the "out" output;
$ nix-build -A pkg.man
produces ./result-man pointing to the "man" output;
$ nix-build -A pkg.all
produces ./result, ./result-man and ./result-bin;
$ nix-build -A pkg.all -A pkg2
produces ./result, ./result-man, ./result-bin and ./result-2.
vfork() is just too weird. For instance, in this build:
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/3330487
the value fromHook.writeSide becomes corrupted in the parent, even
though the child only reads from it. At -O0 the problem goes away.
Probably the child is overriding some spilled temporary variable.
If I get bored I may implement using posix_spawn() instead.
With this flag, if any valid derivation output is missing or corrupt,
it will be recreated by using a substitute if available, or by
rebuilding the derivation. The latter may use hash rewriting if
chroots are not available.
This operation allows fixing corrupted or accidentally deleted store
paths by redownloading them using substituters, if available.
Since the corrupted path cannot be replaced atomically, there is a
very small time window (one system call) during which neither the old
(corrupted) nor the new (repaired) contents are available. So
repairing should be used with some care on critical packages like
Glibc.
Using the immutable bit is problematic, especially in conjunction with
store optimisation. For instance, if the garbage collector deletes a
file, it has to clear its immutable bit, but if the file has
additional hard links, we can't set the bit afterwards because we
don't know the remaining paths.
So now that we support having the entire Nix store as a read-only
mount, we may as well drop the immutable bit. Unfortunately, we have
to keep the code to clear the immutable bit for backwards
compatibility.
It turns out that the immutable bit doesn't work all that well. A
better way is to make the entire Nix store a read-only bind mount,
i.e. by doing
$ mount --bind /nix/store /nix/store
$ mount -o remount,ro,bind /nix/store
(This would typically done in an early boot script, before anything
from /nix/store is used.)
Since Nix needs to be able to write to the Nix store, it now detects
if /nix/store is a read-only bind mount and then makes it writable in
a private mount namespace.
The outputs of a derivation can refer to each other (even though they
cannot have cycles), so they have to be deleted in the right order.
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/3026118
If the options gc-keep-outputs and gc-keep-derivations are both
enabled, you can get a cycle in the liveness graph. There was a hack
to handle this, but it didn't work with multiple-output derivations,
causing the garbage collector to fail with errors like ‘error: cannot
delete path `...' because it is in use by `...'’. The garbage
collector now handles strongly connected components in the liveness
graph as a unit and decides whether to delete all or none of the paths
in an SCC.
Note that this will only work if the client has a very recent Nix
version (post 15e1b2c223), otherwise the
--option flag will just be ignored.
Fixes#50.
This handles the chroot and build hook cases, which are easy.
Supporting the non-chroot-build case will require more work (hash
rewriting!).
Issue #21.
"config.h" must be included first, because otherwise the compiler
might not see the right value of _FILE_OFFSET_BITS. We've had this
before; see 705868a8a9. In this case,
GCC would compute a different address for ‘settings.useSubstitutes’ in
misc.cc because of the off_t in ‘settings’.
Reverts 3854fc9b42.
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/3016700
This is required on systemd, which mounts filesystems as "shared"
subtrees. Changes to shared trees in a private mount namespace are
propagated to the outside world, which is bad.
This is a problem because one process may set the immutable bit before
the second process has created its link.
Addressed random Hydra failures such as:
error: cannot rename `/nix/store/.tmp-link-17397-1804289383' to
`/nix/store/rsvzm574rlfip3830ac7kmaa028bzl6h-nixos-0.1pre-git/upstart-interface-version':
Operation not permitted
Since SubstitutionGoal::finished() in build.cc computes the hash
anyway, we can prevent the inefficiency of computing the hash twice by
letting the substituter tell Nix about the expected hash, which can
then verify it.
Incremental optimisation requires creating links in /nix/store/.links
to all files in the store. However, this means that if we delete a
store path, no files are actually deleted because links in
/nix/store/.links still exists. So we need to check /nix/store/.links
for files with a link count of 1 and delete them.
optimiseStore() now creates persistent, content-addressed hard links
in /nix/store/.links. For instance, if it encounters a file P with
hash H, it will create a hard link
P' = /nix/store/.link/<H>
to P if P' doesn't already exist; if P' exist, then P is replaced by a
hard link to P'. This is better than the previous in-memory map,
because it had the tendency to unnecessarily replace hard links with a
hard link to whatever happened to be the first file with a given hash
it encountered. It also allows on-the-fly, incremental optimisation.
To implement binary caches efficiently, Hydra needs to be able to map
the hash part of a store path (e.g. "gbg...zr7") to the full store
path (e.g. "/nix/store/gbg...kzr7-subversion-1.7.5"). (The binary
cache mechanism uses hash parts as a key for looking up store paths to
ensure privacy.) However, doing a search in the Nix store for
/nix/store/<hash>* is expensive since it requires reading the entire
directory. queryPathFromHashPart() prevents this by doing a cheap
database lookup.
queryValidPaths() combines multiple calls to isValidPath() in one.
This matters when using the Nix daemon because it reduces latency.
For instance, on "nix-env -qas \*" it reduces execution time from 5.7s
to 4.7s (which is indistinguishable from the non-daemon case).
Instead make a single call to querySubstitutablePathInfo() per
derivation output. This is faster and prevents having to implement
the "have" function in the binary cache substituter.
Getting substitute information using the binary cache substituter has
non-trivial latency overhead. A package or NixOS system configuration
can have hundreds of dependencies, and in the worst case (when the
local info cache is empty) we have to do a separate HTTP request for
each of these. If the ping time to the server is t, getting N info
files will take tN seconds; e.g., with a ping time of 0.1s to
nixos.org, sequentially downloading 1000 info files (a typical NixOS
config) will take at least 100 seconds.
To fix this problem, the binary cache substituter can now perform
requests in parallel. This required changing the substituter
interface to support a function querySubstitutablePathInfos() that
queries multiple paths at the same time, and rewriting queryMissing()
to take advantage of parallelism. (Due to local caching,
parallelising queryMissing() is sufficient for most use cases, since
it's almost always called before building a derivation and thus fills
the local info cache.)
For example, parallelism speeds up querying all 1056 paths in a
particular NixOS system configuration from 116s to 2.6s. It works so
well because the eccentricity of the top-level derivation in the
dependency graph is only 9. So we only need 10 round-trips (when
using an unlimited number of parallel connections) to get everything.
Currently we do a maximum of 150 parallel connections to the server.
Thus it's important that the binary cache server (e.g. nixos.org) has
a high connection limit. Alternatively we could use HTTP pipelining,
but WWW::Curl doesn't support it and libcurl has a hard-coded limit of
5 requests per pipeline.
In a private PID namespace, processes have PIDs that are separate from
the rest of the system. The initial child gets PID 1. Processes in
the chroot cannot see processes outside of the chroot. This improves
isolation between builds. However, processes on the outside can see
processes in the chroot and send signals to them (if they have
appropriate rights).
Since the builder gets PID 1, it serves as the reaper for zombies in
the chroot. This might turn out to be a problem. In that case we'll
need to have a small PID 1 process that sits in a loop calling wait().
In chroot builds, set the host name to "localhost" and the domain name
to "(none)" (the latter being the kernel's default). This improves
determinism a bit further.
P.S. I have to idea what UTS stands for.
This improves isolation a bit further, and it's just one extra flag in
the unshare() call.
P.S. It would be very cool to use CLONE_NEWPID (to put the builder in
a private PID namespace) as well, but that's slightly more risky since
having a builder start as PID 1 may cause problems.
On Linux it's possible to run a process in its own network namespace,
meaning that it gets its own set of network interfaces, disjunct from
the rest of the system. We use this to completely remove network
access to chroot builds, except that they get a private loopback
interface. This means that:
- Builders cannot connect to the outside network or to other processes
on the same machine, except processes within the same build.
- Vice versa, other processes cannot connect to processes in a chroot
build, and open ports/connections do not show up in "netstat".
- If two concurrent builders try to listen on the same port (e.g. as
part of a test), they no longer conflict with each other.
This was inspired by the "PrivateNetwork" flag in systemd.
We can't open a SQLite database if the disk is full. Since this
prevents the garbage collector from running when it's most needed, we
reserve some dummy space that we can free just before doing a garbage
collection. This actually revives some old code from the Berkeley DB
days.
Fixes#27.
There is a race condition when doing parallel builds with chroots and
the immutable bit enabled. One process may call makeImmutable()
before the other has called link(), in which case link() will fail
with EPERM. We could retry or wrap the operation in a lock, but since
this condition is rare and I'm lazy, we just use the existing copy
fallback.
Fixes#9.
This should fix rare Hydra errors of the form:
error: symlinking `/nix/var/nix/gcroots/per-user/hydra/hydra-roots/7sfhs5fdmjxm8sqgcpd0pgcsmz1kq0l0-nixos-iso-0.1pre33785-33795' to `/nix/store/7sfhs5fdmjxm8sqgcpd0pgcsmz1kq0l0-nixos-iso-0.1pre33785-33795': File exists
Setting the UNAME26 personality causes "uname" to return "2.6.x",
regardless of the kernel version. This improves determinism in
a few misbehaved packages.
Make the garbage collector more concurrent by deleting valid paths
outside the region where we're holding the global GC lock. This
should greatly reduce the time during which new builds are blocked,
since the deletion accounts for the vast majority of the time spent in
the GC.
To ensure that this is safe, the valid paths are invalidated and
renamed to some arbitrary path while we're holding the lock. This
ensures that we when we finally delete the path, it's not a (newly)
valid or locked path.
Nix now requires SQLite and bzip2 to be pre-installed. SQLite is
detected using pkg-config. We required DBD::SQLite anyway, so
depending on SQLite is not a big problem.
The --with-bzip2, --with-openssl and --with-sqlite flags are gone.
By moving the destructor object to libstore.so, it's also run when
download-using-manifests and nix-prefetch-url exit. This prevents
them from cluttering /nix/var/nix/temproots with stale files.
Not all SQLite builds have the function sqlite3_table_column_metadata.
We were only using it in a schema upgrade check for compatibility with
databases that were probably never seen in the wild. So remove it.
The variable ‘useChroot’ was not initialised properly. This caused
random failures if using the build hook. Seen on Mac OS X 10.7 with Clang.
Thanks to KolibriFX for finding this :-)
Chroots are initialised by hard-linking inputs from the Nix store to
the chroot. This doesn't work if the input has its immutable bit set,
because it's forbidden to create hard links to immutable files. So
temporarily clear the immutable bit when creating and destroying the
chroot.
Note that making regular files in the Nix store immutable isn't very
reliable, since the bit can easily become cleared: for instance, if we
run the garbage collector after running ‘nix-store --optimise’. So
maybe we should only make directories immutable.
I was bitten one time too many by Python modifying the Nix store by
creating *.pyc files when run as root. On Linux, we can prevent this
by setting the immutable bit on files and directories (as in ‘chattr
+i’). This isn't supported by all filesystems, so it's not an error
if setting the bit fails. The immutable bit is cleared by the garbage
collector before deleting a path. The only tricky aspect is in
optimiseStore(), since it's forbidden to create hard links to an
immutable file. Thus optimiseStore() temporarily clears the immutable
bit before creating the link.
unreachable paths. This matters when using --max-freed etc.:
unreachable paths could become reachable again, so it's nicer to
keep them if there is "real" garbage to be deleted. Also, don't use
readDirectory() but read the Nix store and delete invalid paths in
parallel. This reduces GC latency on very large Nix stores.
* Buffer the HashSink. This speeds up hashing a bit because it
prevents lots of calls to the hash update functions (e.g. nix-hash
went from 9.3s to 8.7s of user time on the closure of my
/var/run/current-system).
daemon (which is an error), print a nicer error message than
"Connection reset by peer" or "broken pipe".
* In the daemon, log errors that occur during request parameter
processing.
‘nix-store --export’.
* Add a Perl module that provides the functionality of
‘nix-copy-closure --to’. This is used by build-remote.pl so it no
longer needs to start a separate nix-copy-closure process. Also, it
uses the Perl API to do the export, so it doesn't need to start a
separate nix-store process either. As a result, nix-copy-closure
and build-remote.pl should no longer fail on very large closures due
to an "Argument list too long" error. (Note that having very many
dependencies in a single derivation can still fail because the
environment can become too large. Can't be helped though.)
libstore so that the Perl bindings can use it as well. It's vital
that the Perl bindings use the configuration file, because otherwise
nix-copy-closure will fail with a ‘database locked’ message if the
value of ‘use-sqlite-wal’ is changed from the default.
This should also fix:
nix-instantiate: ./../boost/shared_ptr.hpp:254: T* boost::shared_ptr<T>::operator->() const [with T = nix::StoreAPI]: Assertion `px != 0' failed.
which was caused by hashDerivationModulo() calling the ‘store’
object (during store upgrades) before openStore() assigned it.
derivations added to the store by clients have "correct" output
paths (meaning that the output paths are computed by hashing the
derivation according to a certain algorithm). This means that a
malicious user could craft a special .drv file to build *any*
desired path in the store with any desired contents (so long as the
path doesn't already exist). Then the attacker just needs to wait
for a victim to come along and install the compromised path.
For instance, if Alice (the attacker) knows that the latest Firefox
derivation in Nixpkgs produces the path
/nix/store/1a5nyfd4ajxbyy97r1fslhgrv70gj8a7-firefox-5.0.1
then (provided this path doesn't already exist) she can craft a .drv
file that creates that path (i.e., has it as one of its outputs),
add it to the store using "nix-store --add", and build it with
"nix-store -r". So the fake .drv could write a Trojan to the
Firefox path. Then, if user Bob (the victim) comes along and does
$ nix-env -i firefox
$ firefox
he executes the Trojan injected by Alice.
The fix is to have the Nix daemon verify that derivation outputs are
correct (in addValidPath()). This required some refactoring to move
the hash computation code to libstore.
while checking the contents, since this operation can take a very
long time to finish. Also, fill in missing narSize fields in the DB
while doing this.
even with a very long busy timeout, because SQLITE_BUSY is also
returned to resolve deadlocks. This should get rid of random
"database is locked" errors. This is kind of hard to test though.
* Fix a horrible bug in deleteFromStore(): deletePathWrapped() should
be called after committing the transaction, not before, because the
commit might not succeed.
race with other processes that add new referrers to a path,
resulting in the garbage collector crashing with "foreign key
constraint failed". (Nix/4)
* Make --gc --print-dead etc. interruptible.
because it defines _FILE_OFFSET_BITS. Without this, on
OpenSolaris the system headers define it to be 32, and then
the 32-bit stat() ends up being called with a 64-bit "struct
stat", or vice versa.
This also ensures that we get 64-bit file sizes everywhere.
* Remove the redundant call to stat() in parseExprFromFile().
The file cannot be a symlink because that's the exit condition
of the loop before.
* If a path has disappeared, check its referrers first, and don't try
to invalidate paths that have valid referrers. Otherwise we get a
foreign key constraint violation.
* Read the whole Nix store directory instead of statting each valid
path, which is slower.
* Acquire the global GC lock.
hook script proper, and the stdout/stderr of the builder. Only the
latter should be saved in /nix/var/log/nix/drvs.
* Allow the verbosity to be set through an option.
* Added a flag --quiet to lower the verbosity level.
it requires a certain feature on the build machine, e.g.
requiredSystemFeatures = [ "kvm" ];
We need this in Hydra to make sure that builds that require KVM
support are forwarded to machines that have KVM support. Probably
this should also be enforced for local builds.
the hook every time we want to ask whether we can run a remote build
(which can be very often), we now reuse a hook process for answering
those queries until it accepts a build. So if there are N
derivations to be built, at most N hooks will be started.
faster than the old mode when fsyncs are enabled, because it only
performs an fsync() when doing a checkpoint, rather than at every
commit. Some timings for doing a "nix-instantiate /etc/nixos/nixos
-A system" after modifying the stdenv setup script:
42.5s - SQLite 3.6.23 with truncate mode and fsync
3.4s - SQLite 3.6.23 with truncate mode and no fsync
32.1s - SQLite 3.7.0 with truncate mode and fsync
16.8s - SQLite 3.7.0 with WAL mode and fsync, auto-checkpoint
every 1000 pages
8.3s - SQLite 3.7.0 with WAL mode and fsync, auto-checkpoint
every 8192 pages
1.7s - SQLite 3.7.0 with WAL mode and no fsync
The default is now to use WAL mode with fsyncs. Because WAL doesn't
work on remote filesystems such as NFS (as it uses shared memory),
truncate mode can be re-enabled by setting the "use-sqlite-wal"
option to false.
using the build hook mechanism, by setting the derivation attribute
"preferLocalBuild" to true. This has a few use cases:
- The user environment builder. Since it just creates a bunch of
symlinks without much computation, there is no reason to do it
remotely. In fact, doing it remotely requires the entire closure
of the user environment to be copied to the remote machine, which
is extremely wasteful.
- `fetchurl'. Performing the download on a remote machine and then
copying it to the local machine involves twice as much network
traffic as performing the download locally, and doesn't save any
CPU cycles on the local machine.
An "using namespace std" was added locally in those functions that refer to
names from <cstring>. That is not pretty, but it's a very portable solution,
because strcpy() and friends will be found in both the 'std' and in the global
namespace.
This patch adds the configuration file variable "build-cores" and the
command line argument "--cores". These settings specify the number of
CPU cores to utilize for parallel building within a job, i.e. by passing
an appropriate "-j" flag to GNU Make. The default value is 1, which
means that parallel building is *disabled*. If the number of build cores
is specified as 0 (synonymously: "guess" or "auto"), then the actual
value is supposed to be auto-detected by builders at run-time, i.e by
calling the nproc(1) utility from coreutils.
The environment variable $NIX_BUILD_CORES is available to builders, but
the contents of that variable does *not* influence the hash that goes
into the $out store path, i.e. the number of build cores to be utilized
can be changed at will without requiring any re-builds.
doesn't work because the garbage collector doesn't actually look at
locks. So r22253 was stupid. Use addTempRoot() instead. Also,
locking the temporary directory in exportPath() was silly because it
isn't even in the store.
changed. This prevents corrupt paths from spreading to other
machines. Note that checking the hash is cheap because we're
hashing anyway (because of the --sign feature).
to make the Refs table more space-efficient. For instance, this
reduces the size of the database on my laptop from 93 MiB to 18
MiB. (It was 72 MiB with the old schema on an ext3 disk with a 1
KiB block size.)
This prevents remote builders from being killed by the
`max-silent-time' inactivity monitor while they are waiting for a
long garbage collection to finish. This happens fairly often in the
Hydra build farm.
_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64. Without it, functions like stat() fail on
large file sizes. This happened with a Nix store on squashfs:
$ nix-store --dump /tmp/mnt/46wzqnk4cbdwh1dclhrpqnnz1icak6n7-local-net-cmds > /dev/null
error: getting attributes of path `/tmp/mnt/46wzqnk4cbdwh1dclhrpqnnz1icak6n7-local-net-cmds': Value too large for defined data type
$ stat /tmp/mnt/46wzqnk4cbdwh1dclhrpqnnz1icak6n7-local-net-cmds
File: `/tmp/mnt/46wzqnk4cbdwh1dclhrpqnnz1icak6n7-local-net-cmds'
Size: 0 Blocks: 36028797018963968 IO Block: 1024 regular empty file
(This is a bug in squashfs or mksquashfs, but it shouldn't cause Nix
to fail.)
complete set of live and dead paths before starting the actual
deletion, but determines liveness on demand. I.e. for any path in
the store, it first tries to delete all the referrers, and then the
path itself. This means that the collector can start deleting paths
almost immediately.
(Linux) machines no longer maintain the atime because it's too
expensive, and on the machines where --use-atime is useful (like the
buildfarm), reading the atimes on the entire Nix store takes way too
much time to make it practical.
UTC) rather than 0 (00:00:00). 1 is a better choice because some
programs use 0 as a special value. For instance, the Template
Toolkit uses a timestamp of 0 to denote the non-existence of a file,
so it barfs on files in the Nix store (see
template-toolkit-nix-store.patch in Nixpkgs). Similarly, Maya 2008
fails to load script directories with a timestamp of 0 and can't be
patched because it's closed source.
This will also shut up those "implausibly old time stamp" GNU tar
warnings.
(that is, call the build hook with a certain interval until it
accepts the build).
* build-remote.pl was totally broken: for all system types other than
the local system type, it would send all builds to the *first*
machine of the appropriate type.
poll for it (i.e. if we can't acquire the lock, then let the main
select() loop wait for at most a few seconds and then try again).
This improves parallelism: if two nix-store processes are both
trying to build a path at the same time, the second one shouldn't
block; it should first see if it can build other goals. Also, it
prevents the deadlocks that have been occuring in Hydra lately,
where a process waits for a lock held by another process that's
waiting for a lock held by the first.
The downside is that polling isn't really elegant, but POSIX doesn't
provide a way to wait for locks in a select() loop. The only
solution would be to spawn a thread for each lock to do a blocking
fcntl() and then signal the main thread, but that would require
pthreads.
would just silently store only (fileSize % 2^32) bytes.
* Use posix_fallocate if available when unpacking archives.
* Provide a better error message when trying to unpack something that
isn't a NAR archive.
sure that it works as expected when you pass it a derivation. That
is, we have to make sure that all build-time dependencies are built,
and that they are all in the input closure (otherwise remote builds
might fail, for example). This is ensured at instantiation time by
adding all derivations and their sources to inputDrvs and inputSrcs.
hook. This fixes a problem with log files being partially or
completely filled with 0's because another nix-store process
truncates the log file. It should also be more efficient.
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).
--export' into the Nix store, and optionally check the cryptographic
signatures against /nix/etc/nix/signing-key.pub. (TODO: verify
against a set of public keys.)
path. This is like `nix-store --dump', only it also dumps the
meta-information of the store path (references, deriver). Will add
a `--sign' flag later to add a cryptographic signature, which we
will use for exchanging store paths between build farm machines in a
secure manner.
computing the store path (NIX-77). This is an important security
property in multi-user Nix stores.
Note that this changes the store paths of derivations (since the
derivation aterms are added using addTextToStore), but not most
outputs (unless they use builtins.toFile).
important to get garbage collection to work if there is any
inconsistency in the database (because the referrer table is used to
determine whether it is safe to delete a path).
* `nix-store --verify': show some progress.
from a source directory. All files for which a predicate function
returns true are copied to the store. Typical example is to leave
out the .svn directory:
stdenv.mkDerivation {
...
src = builtins.filterSource
(path: baseNameOf (toString path) != ".svn")
./source-dir;
# as opposed to
# src = ./source-dir;
}
This is important because the .svn directory influences the hash in
a rather unpredictable and variable way.
matters when running as root, since then we don't use the setuid
helper (which already used lchown()).
* Also check for an obscure security problem on platforms that don't
have lchown. Then we can't change the ownership of symlinks, which
doesn't matter *except* when the containing directory is writable by
the owner (which is the case with the top-level Nix store directory).
* Throw more exceptions as BuildErrors instead of Errors. This
matters when --keep-going is turned on. (A BuildError is caught
and terminates the goal in question, an Error terminates the
program.)
seconds without producing output on stdout or stderr (NIX-65). This
timeout can be specified using the `--max-silent-time' option or the
`build-max-silent-time' configuration setting. The default is
infinity (0).
* Fix a tricky race condition: if we kill the build user before the
child has done its setuid() to the build user uid, then it won't be
killed, and we'll potentially lock up in pid.wait(). So also send a
conventional kill to the child.
that have to be done as root: running builders under different uids,
changing ownership of build results, and deleting paths in the store
with the wrong ownership).
`nix-store --delete'. But unprivileged users are not allowed to
ignore liveness.
* `nix-store --delete --ignore-liveness': ignore the runtime roots as
well.
process, so forward the operation.
* Spam the user about GC misconfigurations (NIX-71).
* findRoots: skip all roots that are unreadable - the warnings with
which we spam the user should be enough.
processes can register indirect roots. Of course, there is still
the problem that the garbage collector can only read the targets of
the indirect roots when it's running as root...
* SIGIO -> SIGPOLL (POSIX calls it that).
* Use sigaction instead of signal to register the SIGPOLL handler.
Sigaction is better defined, and a handler registered with signal
appears not to interrupt fcntl(..., F_SETLKW, ...), which is bad.
via the Unix domain socket in /nix/var/nix/daemon.socket. The
server forks a worker process per connection.
* readString(): use the heap, not the stack.
* Some protocol fixes.
* Added `build-users-group', the group under which builds are to be
performed.
* Check that /nix/store has 1775 permission and is owner by the
build-users-group.
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.
