Substitute server discovery

Last month I stumbled upon guile-avahi, writen by Ludovic Courtès, the creator of GNU Guix. Strangely, this package never made its way to Guix repository. With Ludovic help, I released the 0.4 version and added it to Guix.

Having a fully declarative system mechanism in Guix is great. However, every now and then, having some auto-magical configuration can also be appreciable.

In this blog article, Ludovic suggested to advertise guix publish servers on the local network using Avahi. As you may know, Guix supports fetching substitutes from several substitute servers.

When fetching substitutes from an unauthorized substitute server, the substitute signature is checked against an authorized substitute server, typically ci.guix.gnu.org, if it matches then the substitute can be downloaded and installed.

The interesting part is that the unauthorized substitute server can be a mirror or a local machine allowing faster download speed than the official substitute server.

The only missing part to this puzzle is then, to automatically discover guix publish servers on the local network using Avahi and add them the list of substitute servers.

As a first step, I created (guix avahi) module, providing two procedures.

avahi-publish-service-thread ;advertise a service. 
avahi-browse-service-thread  ;discover services.

Then, I added an --advertise option to guix publish using the first procedure defined above,

Usage: guix publish [OPTION]...
Publish /gnu/store over HTTP.

[...]
  -a, --advertise        advertise on the local network

and its counterpart in guix-publish-service-type service:

(guix-publish-configuration
 (host "0.0.0.0")
 (port 3000)
 (advertise? #t) ;advertise using Avahi.
 (cache #f)
 (ttl #f)
 (compression-level 9))

Running avahi-browse, we can now discover kind users providing substitutes on the local network.

mathieu@cervin:~$ avahi-browse -alr
= wlp3s0 IPv4 guix-publish-elbruz                           _guix_publish._tcp   local
   hostname = [elbruz.local]
   address = [192.168.1.51]
   port = [3000]
   txt = []

Finally, I added a --discover option to the guix-daemon, so that it can spawn a guix discover process that uses avahi-browse-service-thread to discover and report the available substitute servers.

Usage: guix-daemon [OPTION...]
guix-daemon -- perform derivation builds and store accesses

[...]
      --discover[=yes/no]    use substitute servers discovered on the local
                             network

The discovered substitute servers are then automatically added to the list of substitute servers. There's of course, a related field in the guix-daemon service:

(guix-configuration
 (authorize-key? #f)
 (discover? #t) ;enable substitute server discovery.
 (substitute-urls '("https://ci.guix.gnu.org"))
 (log-compression 'gzip)
 (build-accounts (* 4 16))
 (extra-options (list "--max-jobs" "16" "--cores" "4")))

Then, running any Guix command, substitutes will be downloaded from local substitute server if possible:

mathieu@cervin:~$ guix pull
Updating channel 'guix' from Git repository at 'https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git'...
Authenticating channel 'guix', commits 9edb3f6 to 770fb65 (2 new commits)...
Building from this channel:
  guix      https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git   770fb65
Computing Guix derivation for 'x86_64-linux'... |
substitute: updating substitutes from 'http://192.168.1.51:3000'... 100.0%
substitute: updating substitutes from 'https://ci.guix.gnu.org'... 100.0%
The following derivations will be built:

[...]
substitute: updating substitutes from 'http://192.168.1.51:3000'... 100.0%
downloading from http://192.168.1.51:3000/nar/gzip/kq69y9h1k3mv1dn289aayfikqizzgmgx-guix-manual
 guix-manual                                             23.2MiB/s 00:00 | 4.7MiB transferred

downloading from http://192.168.1.51:3000/nar/gzip/8f4qppkg0qqmmi1rhzis9hxz6dmwrj3l-guix-cli
 guix-cli                                                968KiB/s 00:02 | 1.4MiB transferred

I have also added a herd command so that discovery can be enabled and disabled at run-time when using Guix System, this way:

herd discover guix-daemon on
herd discover guix-daemon off

Finally, a patch adding this mechanism to the installer is on its way.

This development made me realize that improving substitute download speed was a big deal. I hope to find some time to work on restoring a CDN and maybe work on the IPFS branch.

Until then, many thanks to my sponsors and nice end-of-year festivities!