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.
Previously, if a binary cache is hanging/unreachable/slow,
download-from-binary-cache.pl would also hang without any indication
to the user. Now, if fetching a URL takes more than 5 seconds, it
will print a message to that effect.
Amazon S3 returns HTTP status code 403 if a file doesn't exist and the
user has no permission to list the contents of the bucket. So treat
it as 404 (meaning it's cached in the NARExistence table).
The "$UID != 0" makes no sense: if the local side has write access to
the Nix store (which is always the case) then it doesn't matter if
we're root - we can import unsigned paths either way.
Otherwise it will set the parent's stdin to non-blocking mode, causing
the subsequent read of the set of inputs/outputs to fail randomly.
That's insane.
Before selecting a machine, build-remote.pl will try to run the
command "nix-builds-inhibited" on the machine. If this command exists
and returns a 0 exit code, then the machine won't be used. It's up to
the user to provide this command, but it would typically be a script
that checks whether there is enough disk space and whether the load is
not too high.
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.
This allows providing additional binary caches, useful in scripts like
Hydra's build reproduction scripts, in particular because untrusted
caches are ignored.
This should make live easier for single-user (non-daemon)
installations. Note that when the daemon is used, the "calling user"
is root so we're not using any untrusted caches.
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.
Binary caches can now specify a priority in their nix-cache-info file.
The binary cache substituter checks caches in order of priority. This
is to ensure that fast, static caches like nixos.org/binary-cache are
processed before slow, dynamic caches like hydra.nixos.org.
This allows disabling the use of binary caches, e.g.
$ nix-build ... --option use-binary-caches false
Note that
$ nix-build ... --option binary-caches ''
does not disable all binary caches, since the caches defined by
channels will still be used.
If ‘--link’ is given, nix-push will create hard links to the NAR files
in the store, rather than copying them. This is faster and requires
less disk space. However, it doesn't work if the store is on a
different file system.
I.e. do what git does. I'm too lazy to keep the builtin help text up
to date :-)
Also add ‘--help’ to various commands that lacked it
(e.g. nix-collect-garbage).
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.
Commit 6a214f3e06 copied most of the Nix
shell initialisation code from NixOS to nix-profile.sh; however, that
code assumes a multi-user install and is Linux-specific (e.g. it calls
the "stat" command). So go back to the simple single-user version.
Fixes#49.
Negative lookups are purged from the DB after a day, at most once per
day. However, for non-"have" lookups (e.g. all except "nix-env
-qas"), negative lookups are ignored after one hour. This is to
ensure that you don't have to wait a day for an operation like
"nix-env -i" to start using new binaries in the cache.
Should probably make this configurable.
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.
Output names are now appended to resulting GC symlinks, e.g. by
nix-build. For backwards compatibility, if the output is named "out",
nothing is appended. E.g. doing "nix-build -A foo" on a derivation
that produces outputs "out", "bin" and "dev" will produce symlinks
"./result", "./result-bin" and "./result-dev", respectively.
Channels can now advertise a binary cache by creating a file
<channel-url>/binary-cache-url. The channel unpacker puts these in
its "binary-caches" subdirectory. Thus, the URLS of the binary caches
for the channels added by root appear in
/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/eelco/channels/binary-caches/*. The
binary cache substituter reads these and adds them to the list of
binary caches.
The .nixpkg file format is extended to optionally include the URL of a
binary cache, which will be used in preference to the manifest URL
(which can be set to a non-existent value).
Querying all substitutable paths via "nix-env -qas" is potentially
hard on a server, since it involves sending thousands of HEAD
requests. So a binary cache must now have a meta-info file named
"nix-cache-info" that specifies whether the server wants this. It
also specifies the store prefix so that we don't send useless queries
to a binary cache for a different store prefix.
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.
Commit 6a214f3e06 reused the NixOS
environment initialisation for nix-profile.sh, but this is
inappropriate on systems that don't have multi-user support enabled.
In "nix-env -qas", we don't need the substitute info, we just need to
know if it exists. This can be done using a HTTP HEAD request, which
saves bandwidth.
Note however that curl currently has a bug that prevents it from
reusing HTTP connections if HEAD requests return a 404:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3542731&group_id=976&atid=100976
Without the patch attached to the issue, using HEAD is actually quite
a bit slower than GET.
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.
Using WWW::Curl rather than running an external curl process for every
NAR info file halves the time it takes to get info thanks to libcurl's
support for persistent HTTP connections. (We save a roundtrip per
file.) But the real gain will come from using parallel and/or
pipelined requests.
