"Out of Memory" in Docker preview guest on M1 Mac Mini

[spease]

Describe the bug

All the nix commands I've tried with both the docker LnL7/nix and nixos/nix images fail with out of memory errors using the Docker Preview on an M1 Mac Mini.

EDIT: Note that while my examples show me mounting the CWD to /nixpkgs, this is not necessary to reproduce the bug. Either of these commands will have the same issue without the volume mount:

docker run -it nixos/nix nix-env --version
docker run -it nixos/nix nix eval "(import <nixpkgs> {}).lib.version"
docker run -it lnl7/nix nix eval "(import <nixpkgs> {}).lib.version"
docker run lnl7/nix nix eval "(import <nixpkgs> {}).lib.version"
docker run nixos/nix nix eval "(import <nixpkgs> {}).lib.version"

Steps To Reproduce

Install the current Docker M1 Tech Preview:
https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/apple-m1/
https://desktop.docker.com/mac/m1preview/Docker-AppleSilicon-Preview7.dmg

Execute this command:

docker run -v $(pwd):/nixpkgs -it nixos/nix nix eval "(import <nixpkgs> {}).lib.version"

You'll see:

WARNING: The requested image's platform (linux/amd64) does not match the detected host platform (linux/arm64/v8) and no specific platform was requested
GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 402653184 bytes
GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 557056 bytes
GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 294912 bytes
GC Warning: Out of Memory! Heap size: 0 MiB. Returning NULL!
error: out of memory

You can try increasing the memory, but I got the same error up to 6gb.

Expected behavior

"21.03pre266259.2fcf614ea38"

nix-env --version output

$ docker run -v $(pwd):/nixpkgs -m 1gb -it nixos/nix nix-env --version                              ~/Projects/nixpkgs
WARNING: The requested image's platform (linux/amd64) does not match the detected host platform (linux/arm64/v8) and no specific platform was requested
GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 402653184 bytes
nix-env (Nix) 2.3.10

Additional context

My suspicion is that there is an underlying docker issue, but I still felt it was worth officially documenting it.

[spease]

May be related to NixOS/nixpkgs#38635 (and sorry if this is in the wrong repo)

[vcunat]

No. command time nix eval "(import <nixpkgs> {}).lib.version" reports memory peaking below 40 MB for me. EDIT: the linked issue applies to cases when you evaluate lots of packages to get their names (which isn't considered a "normal usage" nowadays).

[mtiller]

I wanted to add that I'm seeing this same issue and it has nothing to do with nix (as far as I can tell). I'm running the OpenModelica compiler included in the mtiller/book-builder docker image and I randomly get the following errors:

GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 11137024 bytes
GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 262144 bytes
GC Warning: Out of Memory! Heap size: 31 MiB. Returning NULL!

But if I run the command again, it (generally) succeeds (i.e., this is not deterministic behavior...which is frustrating but also suggestive of a bug). This only happens when I use this Docker image on my M1 Mac. As with the OP, I also tried increasing memory, but this isn't an issue with how much memory is available. I can watch the system with top and these processes take almost no memory (max I've seen is 4% of system memory).

[mtiller]

I should add that I'm running a Docker Desktop version that reports itself as being 3.3.0 (62069).

[domenkozar]

Seems to be a docker issue: docker/for-mac#5204