Nix, the purely functional package manager
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Jade Lovelace 7b6622d733 language: cleanly ban integer overflows
This also bans various sneaking of negative numbers from the language
into unsuspecting builtins as was exposed while auditing the
consequences of changing the Nix language integer type to a newtype.

It's unlikely that this change comprehensively ensures correctness when
passing integers out of the Nix language and we should probably add a
checked-narrowing function or something similar, but that's out of scope
for the immediate change.

During the development of this I found a few fun facts about the
language:
- You could overflow integers by converting from unsigned JSON values.
- You could overflow unsigned integers by converting negative numbers
  into them when going into Nix config, into fetchTree, and into flake
  inputs.

  The flake inputs and Nix config cannot actually be tested properly
  since they both ban thunks, however, we put in checks anyway because
  it's possible these could somehow be used to do such shenanigans some
  other way.

Note that Lix has banned Nix language integer overflows since the very
first public beta, but threw a SIGILL about them because we run with
-fsanitize=signed-overflow -fsanitize-undefined-trap-on-error in
production builds. Since the Nix language uses signed integers, overflow
was simply undefined behaviour, and since we defined that to trap, it
did.

Trapping on it was a bad UX, but we didn't even entirely notice
that we had done this at all until it was reported as a bug a couple of
months later (which is, to be fair, that flag working as intended), and
it's got enough production time that, aside from code that is IMHO buggy
(and which is, in any case, not in nixpkgs) such as
https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix/issues/445, we don't think
anyone doing anything reasonable actually depends on wrapping overflow.

Even for weird use cases such as doing funny bit crimes, it doesn't make
sense IMO to have wrapping behaviour, since two's complement arithmetic
overflow behaviour is so *aggressively* not what you want for *any* kind
of mathematics/algorithms. The Nix language exists for package
management, a domain where bit crimes are already only dubiously in
scope to begin with, and it makes a lot more sense for that domain for
the integers to never lose precision, either by throwing errors if they
would, or by being arbitrary-precision.

Fixes: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/10968
Original-CL: https://gerrit.lix.systems/c/lix/+/1596

Change-Id: I51f253840c4af2ea5422b8a420aa5fafbf8fae75
2024-07-30 18:13:05 -07:00
.github Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master' into flake-regressions 2024-07-22 16:03:45 +02:00
build-utils-meson add werror=suggest-override 2024-07-25 07:41:12 +02:00
config Remove and gitignore the autoreconf generated files 2024-03-02 10:18:47 +01:00
contrib function-trace: always show the trace 2019-09-18 23:23:21 +02:00
doc/manual doc/command-ref/nix-shell: Shebangs can occur anywhere (#11202) 2024-07-30 12:51:47 +00:00
m4 Build a minimized Nix with MinGW 2024-04-17 12:26:10 -04:00
maintainers Rename pre-commit-hooks -> git-hooks-nix 2024-07-24 15:55:57 +02:00
misc lint: fix shellcheck for misc/systemv/nix-daemon 2024-07-14 19:56:03 -07:00
mk makefiles: recognize GNU/Hurd 2024-07-30 05:29:32 +02:00
packaging dependencies: Centralize aws-sdk-cpp and sync with Nixpkgs 2024-07-27 02:16:05 +02:00
scripts Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master' into flake-regressions 2024-07-22 16:03:45 +02:00
src language: cleanly ban integer overflows 2024-07-30 18:13:05 -07:00
tests language: cleanly ban integer overflows 2024-07-30 18:13:05 -07:00
.clang-format .clang-format: Remove duplicated key 2024-06-03 18:38:56 +02:00
.clang-tidy Add .clang-tidy 2024-02-01 01:01:39 +01:00
.dir-locals.el .dir-locals.el: Set c-block-comment-prefix 2020-07-10 11:21:06 +02:00
.editorconfig No global eval settings in libnixexpr 2024-06-24 12:15:16 -04:00
.gitignore Stop vendoring toml11 2024-06-26 22:27:13 -04:00
.shellcheckrc housekeeping: shellcheck for tests/functional/ca/build-cache.sh 2024-06-12 17:41:16 -04:00
.version Bump version 2024-06-12 14:57:40 +02:00
CITATION.cff chore: PhD thesis as reference in CITATION.cff 2024-05-18 20:05:22 +02:00
configure.ac Add S3 opt dep to Meson, and simplify build 2024-07-22 11:11:38 -04:00
CONTRIBUTING.md manual: Contributing -> Development, Hacking -> Building (#9014) 2024-07-25 02:53:06 +00:00
COPYING * Change this to LGPL to keep the government happy. 2006-04-25 16:41:06 +00:00
default.nix add flake-compat to flake.nix and use sha256 in default.nix 2023-03-06 21:11:24 +01:00
docker.nix fix "add an option to include flake-registry..." 2023-05-16 14:35:31 +02:00
flake.lock Rename pre-commit-hooks -> git-hooks-nix 2024-07-24 15:55:57 +02:00
flake.nix buildNoTests: Disable unit tests 2024-07-27 13:42:03 +02:00
local.mk local.mk: Solve warnings 2024-04-17 15:37:14 +02:00
Makefile Merge pull request #11180 from Mic92/override-warnings 2024-07-25 03:00:50 -04:00
Makefile.config.in Port C API docs to Meson (#10936) 2024-06-19 22:43:54 +02:00
meson.build Progress on Wine CI support, MinGW dev shell with Meson (#10975) 2024-07-21 22:03:04 +00:00
package.nix package.nix: Empty build inputs if not doBuild 2024-07-27 02:39:55 +02:00
precompiled-headers.h Build a minimized Nix with MinGW 2024-04-17 12:26:10 -04:00
README.md docs: fix link to building instructions (#11207) 2024-07-28 13:34:48 +00:00
shell.nix Remove url literals 2022-01-24 13:28:21 +01:00

Nix

Open Collective supporters Test

Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. Please refer to the Nix manual for more details.

Installation and first steps

Visit nix.dev for installation instructions and beginner tutorials.

Full reference documentation can be found in the Nix manual.

Building and developing

Follow instructions in the Nix reference manual to set up a development environment and build Nix from source.

Contributing

Check the contributing guide if you want to get involved with developing Nix.

Additional resources

Nix was created by Eelco Dolstra and developed as the subject of his PhD thesis The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model, published 2006. Today, a world-wide developer community contributes to Nix and the ecosystem that has grown around it.

License

Nix is released under the LGPL v2.1.