[Nix-dev] Boost postFixup failing

[Ashley Gillman]

Hi Nix Dev,

I am having issues installing on an HPC cluster. My methodology has been using PRoot to mount a directory to /nix. I am using Nix 1.11.2

Impurities seem to be creeping into the build process, that I don't get when building locally. For example, when building Python Pillow, I had to also mount an empty directory over /usr/include, because the builds were including gcc flags for `-I/usr/include` and breaking the build. But this shouldn't happen, should it? The hack of mounting over these directories was a temporary fix.

My current error is when building Boost with GCC49, which again works locally (Ubuntu 14.04) but not on the cluster.

    nix-build -E 'with import <nixpkgs> { }; boost.override { stdenv = overrideCC stdenv gcc49; }'
    ...
    post-installation fixup
    shrinking RPATHs of ELF executables and libraries in /nix/store/fv2wsfc1g43m72xy0398lh8wgi6nsx1z-boost-1.59.0
    gzipping man pages in /nix/store/fv2wsfc1g43m72xy0398lh8wgi6nsx1z-boost-1.59.0
    patching script interpreter paths in /nix/store/fv2wsfc1g43m72xy0398lh8wgi6nsx1z-boost-1.59.0
    shrinking RPATHs of ELF executables and libraries in /nix/store/sgs6pcdj7c3xkmvh0s51hvs06ahan50l-boost-1.59.0-dev
    /nix/store/nkl8p82samb219yr5i7bdx4mm2mgg5ab-stdenv/setup: xmalloc: subst.c:4911: cannot allocate 256 bytes (16777216 bytes allocated)
    builder for ‘/nix/store/xqsq53xim1kbhk4zsdimmjxwc9s13n3b-boost-1.59.0.drv’ failed with exit code 2

This looks like a memory error, but for 16MB? I certainly have much more memory than that available, and increasing the allocated memory for the compute nodes doesn't change the error. I am guessing it may be again due to some impurity, how can these creep in?

Any advise, even on how best to debug, is much appreciated.

Kind regards,
Ashley