Hello Juri, yes in Compute Canada we use Nix to install glibc, and install easybuild on top of a particular (read-only for regular users!) Nix profile. A regular user will use very little outside that stack (exceptions are e.g. the scheduler and suid-needing applications such as Singularity and ssh (because of ssh-keysign).
It is indeed compulsory to use rpath or runpath to link to it; if you point LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the custom glibc you're going to see a big stream of problems because all system utilities use it too then. Nix uses rpath already and that's why it's a convenient choice for us. Now that our setup is in production we sometimes get users who set LD_LIBRARY_PATH themselves to /usr/lib64 etc. and that causes issues too since Nix uses the newer "RUNPATH", and LD_LIBRARY_PATH overrides that. Note that the Nix version we use is new enough that a lot of the boring modules we don't build using easybuild. The ever-growing list now contains: filter-deps = Bison,CMake,flex,ncurses,libreadline,bzip2,zlib,binutils,M4,Autoconf,Automake,libtool,Autotools,Szip,libxml2,sparsehash,SQLite,cURL,Doxygen,expat,Mesa,libGLU,SWIG,PCRE,libjpeg-turbo,LibTIFF,libpng,XZ,ant,gettext,X11,pkg-config,LLVM,libdrm,gperf,FLTK,fontconfig,freetype,GMP,GL2PS,gnuplot,GraphicsMagick,MPFR,libmatheval,Tcl,Tk,CFITSIO,libX11,libXft,libXpm,libXext,makedepend,cairo,libiconv,FFmpeg,GLib We explain our stack to users here: https://docs.computecanada.ca/wiki/Installing_software_in_your_home_directory Note that it can also be almost completely disabled using "module --force purge" to get the bare-bones Linux experience because we put the Nix setup itself inside a module. Regards, Bart On 24 August 2017 at 09:53, Jure Pečar <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi all, > > I found this thread from about two years ago: > www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01795.html > > Have things changed since? Would newer glibc still present a pain from > easybuild point of view? > > New glibc goodies that got me to think in this direction are thread cache > and vectorized basic math functions. > > Compute Canada, you guys use nix for this purpose, right? > > > -- > > Jurij Pečar > HPC Engineer, IT Operations, IT Services > EMBL Heidelberg, Meyerhofstraße 1, 69117, Heidelberg, Germany > Room 13-401 > -- Dr. Bart E. Oldeman | [email protected] | [email protected] Scientific Computing Analyst / Analyste en calcul scientifique McGill HPC Centre / Centre de Calcul Haute Performance de McGill | http://www.hpc.mcgill.ca Calcul Québec | http://www.calculquebec.ca Compute/Calcul Canada | http://www.computecanada.ca Tel/Tél: 514-396-8926 | Fax/Télécopieur: 514-396-8934
