M4 Mac migrated nix daemon crashes immediately

[skeet70]

Describe the bug

I migrated from an M3 Mac to an M4 Mac. I uninstalled nix following the official docs on the M4, then reinstalled with the official installer. It installed without error after having me remove a bunch of backups, but now any nix command I run just gives me

error: Nix daemon disconnected unexpectedly (maybe it crashed?)

Sometimes it'll download things for a bit before that, but once it has cached up to a point, any run of the same command will give me that error immediately. cat /var/log/nix-daemon.log shows a new two entries of

accepted connection from pid <unknown>, user mumu
libc++abi: terminating due to uncaught exception of type nix::Interrupted: error: interrupted by the user

I promise I'm not interrupting anything.

Steps To Reproduce

Doesn't seem particularly reproducible but:

1. Use the Mac Migration assistant to migrate everything from a system with a working nix and nix-darwin installation
2. Follow the official uninstallation instructions, removing backup files as it discovers them.
3. sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) to install nix
4. Run nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m"

Expected behavior

The successful output of nix-info.

Additional Details

nix_2024-11-19-122317_MacBook-Pro.diag.txt
nix-2024-11-19-121348.ips.txt
nix-2024-11-19-122337.ips.txt
nix-2024-11-19-122801.ips.txt
nix-2024-11-19-124924.ips.txt
nix-2024-11-19-124934.ips.txt
nix-2024-11-19-125113.ips.txt
nix-2024-11-19-131620.ips.txt
nix-2024-11-19-134029.ips.txt
nix-2024-11-19-134043.ips.txt
nix-2024-11-19-134056.ips.txt
nix-daemon.log

nix-env --version output

nix-env (Nix) 2.25.2

Priorities

Add 👍 to issues you find important.

[polynomialspace]

Similar symptoms, in my case it seemed to be caused by SSL certs, resolved with solution in this post which then prompted (on channel install of nix-darwin):

error: Unexpected files in /etc, aborting activation
The following files have unrecognized content and would be overwritten:

  /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
  /etc/bashrc
  /etc/zshrc

Please check there is nothing critical in these files, rename them by adding .before-nix-darwin to the end, and then try again.

and following those instructions.

[skeet70]

Something along these lines was the fix for me as well.

[neilyio]

I'm still running into this on an M1 Mac... also a re-installation of Nix.

$ export NIX_CONFIG="experimental-features = nix-command flakes"
$ nix develop
performing daemon worker op: 19
error: Nix daemon disconnected unexpectedly (maybe it crashed?)

I manually started nix-daemon with debug to see some crash details:

~/D/nixbench ❯❯❯ sudo nix-daemon --debug
warning: $HOME ('/Users/neilyio') is not owned by you, falling back to the one defined in the 'passwd' file ('/var/root')
accepted connection from pid <unknown>, user neilhansen
received daemon op 19
objc[97521]: +[NSMutableString initialize] may have been in progress in another thread when fork() was called.
objc[97521]: +[NSMutableString initialize] may have been in progress in another thread when fork() was called. We cannot safely call it or ignore it in the fork() child process. Crashing instead. Set a breakpoint on objc_initializeAfterForkError to debug.

I was able to move forward by running nix-daemon like this:

 sudo env OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY=YES nix-daemon

nix develop is running now.