POSIX file locks are essentially incompatible with multithreading. BSD
locks have much saner semantics. We need this now that there can be
multiple concurrent LocalStore::buildPaths() invocations.
This currently fails because we're using POSIX file locks. So when the
garbage collector opens and closes its own temproots file, it causes
the lock to be released and then deleted by another GC instance.
Scanning of /proc/<pid>/{exe,cwd} was broken because '{memory:' was
prepended twice. Also, get rid of the whole '{memory:...}' thing
because it's unnecessary, we can just list the file in /proc directly.
This new structure makes more sense as there may be many sources rooting
the same store path. Many profiles can reference the same path but this
is even more true with /proc/<pid>/maps where distinct pids can and
often do map the same store path.
This implementation is also more efficient as the `Roots` map contains
only one entry per rooted store path.
If a process disappears between the time /proc/[pid]/maps is opened and
the time it is read, the read() syscall will return ESRCH. This should be ignored.
For example,
$ nix-store -q --roots /nix/store/7phd2sav7068nivgvmj2vpm3v47fd27l-patchelf-0.8pre845_0315148
{temp:1}
denotes that the path is only being kept alive by a temporary root
(i.e. /nix/var/nix/temproots/). Similarly,
$ nix-store --gc --print-roots
...
{memory:9} -> /nix/store/094gpjn9f15ip17wzxhma4r51nvsj17p-curl-7.53.1
shows that curl is being used by some process.
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.
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 primarily to subsume the functionality of the
copy-from-other-stores substituter. For example, in the NixOS
installer, we can now do (assuming we're in the target chroot, and the
Nix store of the installation CD is bind-mounted on /tmp/nix):
$ nix-build ... --option substituters 'local?state=/tmp/nix/var&real=/tmp/nix/store'
However, unlike copy-from-other-stores, this also allows write access
to such a store. One application might be fetching substitutes for
/nix/store in a situation where the user doesn't have sufficient
privileges to create /nix, e.g.:
$ NIX_REMOTE="local?state=/home/alice/nix/var&real=/home/alice/nix/store" nix-build ...
Caching path info is generally useful. For instance, it speeds up "nix
path-info -rS /run/current-system" (i.e. showing the closure sizes of
all paths in the closure of the current system) from 5.6s to 0.15s.
This also eliminates some APIs like Store::queryDeriver() and
Store::queryReferences().
Samuel Dionne-Riel
Jörg Thalheim