Nix 1.1 (2012-07-18) - Lix Reference Manual

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# Release 1.1 (2012-07-18)

This release has the following improvements:

- On Linux, when doing a chroot build, Nix now uses various namespace features provided by the Linux kernel to improve build isolation. Namely:

  - The private network namespace ensures that builders cannot talk to the outside world (or vice versa): each build only sees a private loopback interface. This also means that two concurrent builds can listen on the same port (e.g. as part of a test) without conflicting with each other.

  - The PID namespace causes each build to start as PID 1. Processes outside of the chroot are not visible to those on the inside. On the other hand, processes inside the chroot are visible from the outside (though with different PIDs).

  - The IPC namespace prevents the builder from communicating with outside processes using SysV IPC mechanisms (shared memory, message queues, semaphores). It also ensures that all IPC objects are destroyed when the builder exits.

  - The UTS namespace ensures that builders see a hostname of `localhost` rather than the actual hostname.

  - The private mount namespace was already used by Nix to ensure that the bind-mounts used to set up the chroot are cleaned up automatically.

- Build logs are now compressed using `bzip2`. The command `nix-store -l` decompresses them on the fly. This can be disabled by setting the option `build-compress-log` to `false`.

- The creation of build logs in `/nix/var/log/nix/drvs` can be disabled by setting the new option `build-keep-log` to `false`. This is useful, for instance, for Hydra build machines.

- Nix now reserves some space in `/nix/var/nix/db/reserved` to ensure that the garbage collector can run successfully if the disk is full. This is necessary because SQLite transactions fail if the disk is full.

- Added a basic `fetchurl` function. This is not intended to replace the `fetchurl` in Nixpkgs, but is useful for bootstrapping; e.g., it will allow us to get rid of the bootstrap binaries in the Nixpkgs source tree and download them instead. You can use it by doing `import <nix/fetchurl.nix> { url = url; sha256 = "hash"; }`. (Shea Levy)

- Improved RPM spec file. (Michel Alexandre Salim)

- Support for on-demand socket-based activation in the Nix daemon with `systemd`.

- Added a manpage for nix.conf5.

- When using the Nix daemon, the `-s` flag in `nix-env -qa` is now much faster.