This hook can be used to set system-specific per-derivation build
settings that don't fit into the derivation model and are too complex or
volatile to be hard-coded into nix. Currently, the pre-build hook can
only add chroot dirs/files through the interface, but it also has full
access to the chroot root.
The specific use case for this is systems where the operating system ABI
is more complex than just the kernel-support system calls. For example,
on OS X there is a set of system-provided frameworks that can reliably
be accessed by any program linked to them, no matter the version the
program is running on. Unfortunately, those frameworks do not
necessarily live in the same locations on each version of OS X, nor do
their dependencies, and thus nix needs to know the specific version of
OS X currently running in order to make those frameworks available. The
pre-build hook is a perfect mechanism for doing just that.
This hook can be used to set system specific per-derivation build
settings that don't fit into the derivation model and are too complex or
volatile to be hard-coded into nix. Currently, the pre-build hook can
only add chroot dirs/files.
The specific use case for this is systems where the operating system ABI
is more complex than just the kernel-supported system calls. For
example, on OS X there is a set of system-provided frameworks that can
reliably be accessed by any program linked to them, no matter the
version the program is running on. Unfortunately, those frameworks do
not necessarily live in the same locations on each version of OS X, nor
do their dependencies, and thus nix needs to know the specific version
of OS X currently running in order to make those frameworks available.
The pre-build hook is a perfect mechanism for doing just that.
This is because we don't want to do HTTP requests on every evaluation,
even though we can prevent a full redownload via the cached ETag. The
default is one hour.
This was causing NixOS VM tests to fail mysteriously since
5ce50cd99e. Nscd could (sometimes) no
longer read /etc/hosts:
open("/etc/hosts", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
Probably there was some wacky interaction between the guest kernel and
the 9pfs implementation in QEMU.
Thus, for example, to get /bin/sh in a chroot, you only need to
specify /bin/sh=${pkgs.bash}/bin/sh in build-chroot-dirs. The
dependencies of sh will be added automatically.
I'm seeing hangs in Glibc's setxid_mark_thread() again. This is
probably because the use of an intermediate process to make clone()
safe from a multi-threaded program (see
524f89f139) is defeated by the use of
vfork(), since the intermediate process will have a copy of Glibc's
threading data structures due to the vfork(). So use a regular fork()
again.
If ‘build-use-chroot’ is set to ‘true’, fixed-output derivations are
now also chrooted. However, unlike normal derivations, they don't get
a private network namespace, so they can still access the
network. Also, the use of the ‘__noChroot’ derivation attribute is
no longer allowed.
Setting ‘build-use-chroot’ to ‘relaxed’ gives the old behaviour.
chroot only changes the process root directory, not the mount namespace root
directory, and it is well-known that any process with chroot capability can
break out of a chroot "jail". By using pivot_root as well, and unmounting the
original mount namespace root directory, breaking out becomes impossible.
Non-root processes typically have no ability to use chroot() anyway, but they
can gain that capability through the use of clone() or unshare(). For security
reasons, these syscalls are limited in functionality when used inside a normal
chroot environment. Using pivot_root() this way does allow those syscalls to be
put to their full use.
I.e., not readable to the nixbld group. This improves purity a bit for
non-chroot builds, because it prevents a builder from enumerating
store paths (i.e. it can only access paths it knows about).
Especially in WAL mode on a highly loaded machine, this is not a good
idea because it results in a WAL file of approximately the same size
ad the database, which apparently cannot be deleted while anybody is
accessing it.
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.
