makeself failing to build on Hydra: “Not enough space left in /build (2546273408 KB) to decompress ./makeself-test.run (1 KB)”

[andersk]

Currently the nixos-unstable channel is blocked because nixos.ova is failing due to its dependency nixpkgs.makeself:

Not enough space left in /build (2845170688 KB) to decompress ./makeself-test.run (1 KB)
Use --nodiskspace option to skip this check and proceed anyway
Consider setting TMPDIR to a directory with more free space.
testQuiet:20:Failed
…
Done. 2 passed. 1 failed. 0 skipped.

*** ERROR: Test 'extracttest' failed!

make: *** [Makefile:20: test] Error 1
builder for '/nix/store/h6kp4lp90gqwwxnjy7bp528haid0rbk9-makeself-2.4.2.drv' failed with exit code 2

I haven’t been able to reproduce this locally. The error doesn’t make sense. It seems to come from here:

    leftspace=\`MS_diskspace "\$tmpdir"\`
    if test -n "\$leftspace"; then
        if test "\$leftspace" -lt $USIZE; then
            echo
            echo "Not enough space left in "\`dirname \$tmpdir\`" (\$leftspace KB) to decompress \$0 ($USIZE KB)" >&2
            echo "Use --nodiskspace option to skip this check and proceed anyway" >&2
            if test x"\$keep" = xn; then
                echo "Consider setting TMPDIR to a directory with more free space."
            fi
            eval \$finish; exit 1
        fi
    fi

But plainly 2845170688 is not less than 1, unless there’s a signed 32-bit overflow bug in /bin/sh, which I don’t think there is? Is /bin/sh something wacky on Hydra?

Notify maintainers
@wmertens

Maintainer information:

# a list of nixpkgs attributes affected by the problem
attribute: [makeself]
# a list of nixos modules affected by the problem
module: []

[vcunat]

This problem has been appearing randomly for months at least. I had looked into it a bit, but I had no idea what's wrong. A few retries usually work around it.

[andersk]

Cc @megastep in case you have any ideas?

[megastep]

Not really sure, but I'd check what the output of the df command gives you since that's what's used to determine disk space. Maybe the filesystem is reporting this erroneously.

[FRidh]

Currently not channel blocking so I changed the label.

[andersk]

This has blocked the last two nixos-unstable updates again (among other failures).

[vcunat]

So, it really is 31-bit overflow in our default build-time /bin/sh:

$ nix build -f. busybox-sandbox-shell
$ ./result/bin/sh

BusyBox v1.33.1 () built-in shell (ash)

$ test 2845170688 -lt 1; echo $?
0

[vcunat]

... and cross-ref to upstream: https://bugs.busybox.net/show_bug.cgi?id=13926