Nix needs relocatable binaries

Published 2026-06-21 on Farid Zakaria's Blog

This is my problem statement and proposal for a TacoSprint 2026 project 🏄.

Nix, or store-based systems, are a class of package managers that use a well-defined prefix to store all packages. This can be /nix/store for Nix or /gnu/store for Guix.

This is simple. It makes rewriting paths to binaries or libraries easy. Derivations only need to sed the strings with the full store-path; /bin/bash becomes /nix/store/gik3rh1vz2jlgnifb9dh6vc6sxwwz9jj-bash-5.3p9/bin/bash for instance.

What if you wanted a different path, one not prefixed at the root / ?

This could be desirable if you don’t have Nix installed already or are missing necessary permissions – “rootless Nix”.

Well, Nix already lets you specify a different store-path today but there is a catch!

Let’s take a look at a simple example. We can build hello two different ways.

> nix build nixpkgs#hello

> nix build --store /tmp/fzakaria/store nixpkgs#hello

The first command builds and installs hello at /nix/store/zi2bj2hlavv8q743li2s9diqbcpmrf9b-hello-2.12.3/ and the second at /tmp/fzakaria/store/nix/store/zi2bj2hlavv8q743li2s9diqbcpmrf9b-hello-2.12.3/ using chroot and mount namespaces.

Notice both have the same hash zi2bj2hlavv8q743li2s9diqbcpmrf9b.

This is important. By keeping the hash the same, we can leverage the precomputed derivations from binary substituters like https://cache.nixos.org.

Ok, so what’s missing?

If you are using tools like Bazel or Buck2 they likely already employ their own sandboxing via namespacing for builds. Integrating Nix into these ecosystems becomes incredibly impractical because we run into nested user namespace and mount restrictions.

We can ask Nix to use an alternate store prefix, without chroot and mount namespaces but it has a big gap.

> XDG_CACHE_HOME=/tmp/fzakaria/cache \
nix eval --store 'local?store=/tmp/fzakaria/store&state=/tmp/fzakaria/state&log=/tmp/fzakaria/log' \
--raw nixpkgs#hello.outPath
/tmp/fzakaria/store/qv3fhi1j9gh27fyds5n5b16yia8i6zn5-hello-2.12.3

The hash is now qv3fhi1j9gh27fyds5n5b16yia8i6zn5 😭

It’s even more disastrous. Changing this simple string cascade-invalidates the entire dependency graph. You are now waiting 4 hours for GCC to compile just so you can print “Hello World” from a different folder. 🫠

This means we cannot leverage the public cache. This gap is called out by the Nix documentation today.

Does it have to be that way?

What if we could install Nix binaries anywhere, without using namespacing or chroot. Can we have our cake and eat it too? 🍰

Nix needs relocatable binaries.

The problem is that the store-prefix is part of the derivation itself so it affects the hash calculation.

We don’t have to specify the full store-prefix everywhere. What if we used relative paths ? 🤔

Let’s look at one place the full paths are written today in the binary via RUNPATH.

> patchelf $(nix build --no-link --print-out-paths nixpkgs#hello)/bin/hello \
            --print-rpath
/nix/store/57iz36553175g3178pvxjij8z5rcsd4n-glibc-2.42-61/lib

When this program runs, the dynamic linker looks at RUNPATH to find its shared dependencies.

The loader in Linux however natively supports the variable $ORIGIN which translates to “the directory containing the executable.” [ref]

We could instead write the RUNPATH to be $ORIGIN/../../57iz36553175g3178pvxjij8z5rcsd4n-glibc-2.42-61/lib.

If we did that then changing the store would cause no hashes to change. No recompilation. 🥳

Okay, so are we done?

Well, like most things the devil is in the details. 😈

Before the dynamic linker can read the RUNPATH to find the necessary libraries, the Linux kernel has to load the dynamic linker itself. This path is stored in a different ELF header called PT_INTERP (Program Interpreter).

> patchelf $(nix build --no-link --print-out-paths nixpkgs#hello)/bin/hello \
        --print-interpreter
/nix/store/57iz36553175g3178pvxjij8z5rcsd4n-glibc-2.42-61/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2

Unfortunately, the Linux Kernel does not support $ORIGIN in this field as of today.

We run into the exact same kernel limitation with the shebang line in scripts as well.

#!/nix/store/gik3rh1vz2jlgnifb9dh6vc6sxwwz9jj-bash-5.3p9/bin/bash
echo "Hello!"

When we execute a script, the kernel parses the #! (shebang) and expects an absolute path. Support for $ORIGIN is also lacking as as of today.

We cannot use relative paths reliably here unless they are relative to the current working directory, which breaks the moment you run the script from anywhere else.

How Do We Get There? 🗺️

To achieve true relocatable binaries, we need to bypass these kernel limitations. $ORIGIN historically would never make sense for PT_INTERP in the Linux kernel because “Why would you want your dynamic linker to be found relative to the file!?”.

Nix has changed that assessment. There are a few ways we could attack this:

1. We could patch the Linux kernel so that $ORIGIN is supported in PT_INTERP and the shebang.

2. We wrap every binary with a small static binary that computes its own location and then invokes the dynamic linker.

3. We need to replace file locations to also leverage language-specific features for relative paths. For instance, in Python we can leverage __file__ to access files relative to itself similar to $ORIGIN.

I believe augmenting support in the Linux kernel is the right approach. The beauty of Nix is we can even patch the kernel today in any NixOS machine for this support.

As a final cherry on top, we can include additional metadata relocatable = true; on every derivation whether it’s relocatable. 🍒

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