From 3c4e401c9ee9bd837ce6446cd2ddb9b1bed40f8a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Florian Klink <flokli@flokli.de>
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2021 00:30:44 +0200
Subject: chore(tvix/docs): move from doc

Most other docs folders in the repo are called `doc` too, let's make
this consistent.

Change-Id: Icd712429b51763076548c977321e370f2a77877e
Reviewed-on: https://cl.tvl.fyi/c/depot/+/2741
Tested-by: BuildkiteCI
Reviewed-by: tazjin <mail@tazj.in>
---
 tvix/docs/components.md | 114 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 114 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 tvix/docs/components.md

(limited to 'tvix/docs/components.md')

diff --git a/tvix/docs/components.md b/tvix/docs/components.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..19e7baa3ec
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tvix/docs/components.md
@@ -0,0 +1,114 @@
+---
+title: "Tvix - Architecture & data flow"
+numbersections: true
+author:
+- adisbladis
+- flokli
+- tazjin
+email:
+- adis@blad.is
+- mail@tazj.in
+lang: en-GB
+classoption:
+- twocolumn
+header-includes:
+- \usepackage{caption, graphicx, tikz, aeguill, pdflscape}
+---
+
+# Background
+
+We intend for Tvix tooling to be more decoupled than the existing,
+monolithic Nix implementation. In practice, we expect to gain several
+benefits from this, such as:
+
+- Ability to use different builders
+- Ability to use different store implementations
+- No monopolisation of the implementation, allowing users to replace
+  components that they are unhappy with (up to and including the
+  language evaluator)
+- Less hidden intra-dependencies between tools due to explicit RPC/IPC
+  boundaries
+
+Communication between different components of the system will use
+gRPC. The rest of this document outlines the components.
+
+# Components
+
+## Coordinator
+
+*Purpose:* The coordinator (in the simplest case, the Tvix CLI tool)
+oversees the flow of a build process and delegates tasks to the right
+subcomponents. For example, if a user runs the equivalent of
+`nix-build` in a folder containing a `default.nix` file, the
+coordinator will invoke the evaluator, pass the resulting derivations
+to the builder and coordinate any necessary store interactions (for
+substitution and other purposes).
+
+While many users are likely to use the CLI tool as their primary
+method of interacting with Tvix, it is not unlikely that alternative
+coordinators (e.g. for a distributed, "Nix-native" CI system) would be
+implemented. To facilitate this, we are considering implementing the
+coordinator on top of a state-machine model that would make it
+possible to reuse the FSM logic without tying it to any particular
+kind of application.
+
+## Evaluator
+
+*Purpose:* Eval takes care of evaluating Nix code. In a typical build
+flow it would be responsible for producing derivations. It can also be
+used as a standalone tool, for example, in use-cases where Nix is used
+to generate configuration without any build or store involvement.
+
+*Requirements:* For now, it will run on the machine invoking the build
+command itself. We give it filesystem access to handle things like
+imports or `builtins.readFile`.
+
+In the future, we might abstract away raw filesystem access by
+allowing the evaluator to request files from the coordinator (which
+will query the store for it). This might get messy, and the benefits
+are questionable. We might be okay with running the evaluator with
+filesystem access for now and can extend the interface if the need
+arises.
+
+## Builder
+
+*Purpose:* A builder receives derivations from the coordinator and
+builds them.
+
+By making builder a standardised interface it's possible to make the
+sandboxing mechanism used by the build process pluggable.
+
+Nix is currently using a hard-coded
+[libseccomp](https://github.com/seccomp/libseccomp) based sandboxing
+mechanism and another one based on
+[sandboxd](https://www.unix.com/man-page/mojave/8/sandboxd/) on macOS.
+These are only separated by [compiler preprocessor
+macros](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cpp/Ifdef.html) within the same
+source files despite having very little in common with each other.
+
+This makes experimentation with alternative backends difficult and
+porting Nix to other platforms harder than it has to be. We want to
+write a new Linux builder which uses
+[OCI](https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec), the current
+dominant Linux containerisation technology, by default.
+
+With a well-defined builder abstraction, it's also easy to imagine
+other backends such as a Kubernetes-based one in the future.
+
+## Store
+
+*Purpose:* Store takes care of storing build results. It provides a
+unified interface to get file paths and upload new ones.
+
+Most likely, we will end up with multiple implementations of store, a
+few possible ones that come to mind are:
+
+- Local
+- SSH
+- GCP
+- S3
+- Ceph
+
+# Figures
+
+![component flow](./component-flow.svg)
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