This is a statically linked version of Nix with some patches intended to ease the installation and usage of Nix on typical HPC clusters. There are patches for:

1. Disable fallocate and luster xattr removal: Luster filesystems do not support fallocate and have unremovable extended attributes.
2. Expand CA certificate search path: CentOS among others store the CA bundle at a different location to the default fallback paths.
3. Make final binary relocatable: paths are searched relative to the Nix binary allowing the executable to be relocated anywhere.
4. Handle large file hash rewriting on disk rather than memory to allow large store objects. This currently relies on mmap and so only works on platforms supporting it.

Building

With Flakes enabled:

nix build github:jbedo/static-nix

By default patches 2, 3, and 4 are enabled.

Experimental SLURM submissions

There's a highly experimental patch, more of a POC, for adding SLURM submission support to Nix. This is intended to run on HPC systems managed by SLURM queueing systems and submits all builds as individual jobs. This makes it easy to farm builds out across traditional HPC via a remote store, with the nix-daemon running on a node with submission permissions.

For this specific use case, the slurm-ssh-wrapper-bundle target produces a single executable which can then be called via an ssh authorized_keys entry like so:

command="/path/to/ssh-wrapper" ssh-rsa ...

The machine can then be used as a remote builder or store (via --builders or --store) with the builds resulting in slurm jobs.

The variables TMPDIR, STOREROOT, and SLURMPREFIX must be set appropriately in flake.nix.

Resources to request for a derivation is specified via the PPN, MEMORY, and WALLTIME attributes, e.g.,:

stdenv.mkDerivation {
  ...
  PPN = 10; # 10 CPUs
  MEMORY = "5G"; # 5 GiB of ram
  WALLTIME = "24:00:00"; # 1 day max walltime
}

Use with BioNix

BioNix can be used with this experimental SLURM patch by passing the resource requirements down through an overlay:

(_: super: {
  exec = f: x@{ ppn ? 1, mem ? 1, walltime ? "2:00:00", ... }: y:
    (f (removeAttrs x [ "ppn" "mem" "walltime" ]) y).overrideAttrs (attrs: {
      PPN = if attrs.passthru.multicore or false then ppn else 1;
      MEMORY = toString mem + "G";
      WALLTIME = walltime;
    });
})