Nix Installation Failure on "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows"

[chexxor]

Issue description

As a Windows 10 user, I want to use Nix to manage packages in my "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows" environment.

I follow the Nix installation instructions, which is bash <(curl https://nixos.org/nix/install), but I get an error: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error. See "Steps to reproduce", below.

It seems the "nix-store" binary can't be executed. I did readelf -a $NIX_STORE, which shows the following summary at the top:

• Magic: 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
• Class: ELF64
• Data: 2's complement, little endian
• Version: 1 (current)
• OS/ABI: UNIX - System V
• ABI Version: 0
• Type: EXEC (Executable file)
• Machine: Advanced Micro Devices X86-64
• Version: 0x1
• Entry point address: 0x407770
• Start of program headers: 64 (bytes into file)
• Start of section headers: 149120 (bytes into file)
• Flags: 0x0
• Size of this header: 64 (bytes)
• Size of program headers: 56 (bytes)
• Number of program headers: 9
• Size of section headers: 64 (bytes)
• Number of section headers: 31
• Section header string table index: 28

(Moved from nixpkgs issue: NixOS/nixpkgs#17915)

Steps to reproduce

After installing "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows", enter a bash shell and execute the Nix installation command to see the following results:

alex@ALEX-CARBON:/mnt/c/Users/Alex$ bash <(curl https://nixos.org/nix/install)
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  2590  100  2590    0     0   5121      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  5118
downloading Nix binary tarball for x86_64-linux from 'https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-1.11.2/nix-1.11.2-x86_64-linux.tar.bz2' to '/tmp/nix-binary-tarball-unpack.3ZltkRNJp1'...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
 37 67.1M   37 25.0M    0     0   403k      0  0:02:50  0:01:03  0:01:47  729k
100 67.1M  100 67.1M    0     0   531k      0  0:02:09  0:02:09 --:--:--  524k
performing a single-user installation of Nix...
copying Nix to /nix/store...........................
initialising Nix database...
/tmp/nix-binary-tarball-unpack.3ZltkRNJp1/unpack/nix-1.11.2-x86_64-linux/install: line 58: /nix/store/4z8srway6dl128dxzn5r0wwdvglz3m61-nix-1.11.2/bin/nix-store: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error
/tmp/nix-binary-tarball-unpack.3ZltkRNJp1/unpack/nix-1.11.2-x86_64-linux/install: failed to initialize the Nix database

Technical details

• System:
  ** Windows 10 Pro, Version 1607, OS Build 14393.51, System type 64-bit OS, x64-based CPU (Intel Core i5-5200U)
  ** uname -a: Linux ALEX-CARBON 3.4.0+ The sync option #1 PREEMPT Thu Aug 1 17:06:05 CST 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
• Nix version: Latest installation script

[jb55]

An important thing to note is that even if it served a proper binary, it wouldn't work because Nix currently doesn't work on Windows. I tracked it down to a failing prctl call in util.cc. But that's for another issue...

[Ericson2314]

I heard that nix binaries have a custom ELF interpreter (aka the dynamic linker) which the Windows Linux subsystem doesn't yet support.

[bobvanderlinden]

Related microsoft/WSL#743

[dezgeg]

This has been fixed by Microsoft in the latest Windows Insider builds.