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.
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.
Setting the UNAME26 personality causes "uname" to return "2.6.x",
regardless of the kernel version. This improves determinism in
a few misbehaved packages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
_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.)
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
