`vhost-device-vsock`[1] is a custom implementation of AF_VSOCK, but the application on the host-side uses a UNIX domain-socket. This gives us the following nice properties: * We don't need to do `--arg sandbox-paths /dev/vhost-vsock` anymore for debugging builds within the sandbox. That means, untrusted users can also debug these kinds of tests now. * This prevents CID conflicts on the host-side, i.e. there's no need for using `sshBackdoor.vsockOffset` for tests anymore. A big shout-out goes to Allison Karlitskaya, the developer of test.thing[2] who talked about this approach to do AF_VSOCK on All Systems Go 2025. This patch requires systemd 258[3] because this contains `vhost-mux` in its SSH config which is needed to connect to the VMs from now on. To not blow up the patches even more, this only uses AF_VSOCK for the debugger. A potential follow-up for the future would be a removal of the current `backdoor.service` and replace it entirely by this functionality. The internal implementation tries to be consistent with how VLANs and machines are handled, i.e. the processes are started when the Driver's context is entered and cleaned up in __exit__(). I decided to push the process management and creation of sockets for vhost-device-vsock into its own class, that's an implementation detail and not a concern for the test-driver. In fact, `vhost-device-vsock` is something we can drop once QEMU implements native support for using AF_UNIX on the host-side[4]. `VsockPair` is its own class since returning e.g. a triple of `(Path, Path, Int)` would be ambiguous in what is the guest and what the host path (and frankly, I found it hard to distinguish the two when reading the docs of `vhost-device-vsock` initially). Finally, now that we can do the SSH backdoor without adding additional devices to the sandbox, I figured, it's time to write a test-case for it. [1] https://github.com/rust-vmm/vhost-device/blob/main/vhost-device-vsock/README.md [2] https://codeberg.org/lis/test.thing [3] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/427968 [4] https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/2095
Nixpkgs is a collection of over 120,000 software packages that can be installed with the Nix package manager. It also implements NixOS, a purely-functional Linux distribution.
Manuals
- NixOS Manual - how to install, configure, and maintain a purely-functional Linux distribution
- Nixpkgs Manual - contributing to Nixpkgs and using programming-language-specific Nix expressions
- Nix Package Manager Manual - how to write Nix expressions (programs), and how to use Nix command line tools
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Nixpkgs and NixOS are built and tested by our continuous integration system, Hydra.
- Continuous package builds for unstable/master
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- Tests for the NixOS 25.11 release
Artifacts successfully built with Hydra are published to cache at https://cache.nixos.org/. When successful build and test criteria are met, the Nixpkgs expressions are distributed via Nix channels.
Contributing
Nixpkgs is among the most active projects on GitHub. While thousands of open issues and pull requests might seem like a lot at first, it helps to consider it in the context of the scope of the project. Nixpkgs describes how to build tens of thousands of pieces of software and implements a Linux distribution. The GitHub Insights page gives a sense of the project activity.
Community contributions are always welcome through GitHub Issues and Pull Requests.
For more information about contributing to the project, please visit the contributing page.
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License
Nixpkgs is licensed under the MIT License.
Note
MIT license does not apply to the packages built by Nixpkgs, merely to the files in this repository (the Nix expressions, build scripts, NixOS modules, etc.). It also might not apply to patches included in Nixpkgs, which may be derivative works of the packages to which they apply. The aforementioned artifacts are all covered by the licenses of the respective packages.