| 21 Jan 2026 |
 eveeifyeve | There is public benchmarks of it here: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/issues/1269 | 13:18:18 |
 Katalin 🔪 | inside the sandboxed nix build on linux, the cwd is /build afaik | 13:18:24 |
| Katalin 🔪 | I think you cannot do that on macOS due to no mount namespaces | 13:18:35 |
 Steve | It doesn't pick up the right one: $HOME is set to the user directory, but it claims it is "/build" ? | 13:18:47 |
| eveeifyeve | But it would be interesting to remeasure again to see if this is still the case. | 13:18:57 |
 K900 | The performance of Docker Desktop and QEMU are pretty much aligned
| 13:19:06 |
| K900 | So like | 13:19:12 |
 leona | when that's the benchmark, there's not much of a difference | 13:19:17 |
| Katalin 🔪 | > warning: $HOME ('/build') is not owned by you, falling back to the one defined in the 'passwd' file ('/var/empty') | 13:19:38 |
| Katalin 🔪 | it explicitly says it picks /var/empty | 13:19:43 |
| Katalin 🔪 | which might be the new /homeless-shelter | 13:19:57 |
| Katalin 🔪 | I haven't seen that path in a while fwiw | 13:20:03 |
| Katalin 🔪 | and $HOME inside a nix build is generally not writable | 13:20:49 |
| Katalin 🔪 | anything that needs it sets it to a temp path | 13:20:54 |
| Katalin 🔪 | or like the build dir or whatever | 13:21:06 |
| Steve | I checked: it's the home-directory of root in /etc/passwd on macOS. My user is missing in this file. I tried to add it manually, but no change. | 13:21:25 |
| Katalin 🔪 | I'm talking about /homeless-shelter | 13:21:38 |
| K900 | I would recommend setting up a Linux builder with nix-darwin | 13:21:50 |
 Ihar Hrachyshka | In the link, when they disable Rosetta, the numbers are now aligned. Great achievement but like ... without Rosetta what's the point? | 13:21:57 |
| K900 | And then running the actual nixos config build on that | 13:21:57 |
| Katalin 🔪 | the user is missing because this is not managed in passwd | 13:22:01 |
| Katalin 🔪 | your user, that is | 13:22:04 |
| K900 | Because doing this natively on Darwin is probably not worth it | 13:22:08 |
| Katalin 🔪 | it's managed in open directory | 13:22:11 |
| eveeifyeve | I will benchmark it on decent hardware M4 Macbook pro first with everything pretty much closed, just to see if it's worth it. | 13:23:44 |
| Katalin 🔪 | anyway here's my theory on what's going on: the package build sets HOME=/build explicitly, expecting that to be the build dir, which it is on linux, but it isn't on darwin | 13:23:52 |
| eveeifyeve | * I will benchmark it on decent hardware M4 Macbook pro first with everything pretty much closed, just to see if it's worth it first. | 13:23:59 |
| Katalin 🔪 | and then whatever prints this message picks it up and says "this is garbage, let me reset it again" | 13:24:07 |
| Katalin 🔪 | and this isn't a problem on linux because there the correct path is indeed /build | 13:24:26 |
| Steve | OK. I'll try that. Thanks. | 13:24:47 |
