unable to start build process while installing Nix

[sudip-yirifi]

Error

Error: 
   0: Install failure
   1: Error executing action
   2: Action `configure_nix` errored
   3: Action `setup_default_profile` errored
   4: Failed to execute command with status 1 `HOME="/root" NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE="/nix/store/852a51xd3m7jyzifqimxc3jf3w2ipc4k-nss-cacert-3.101/etc/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt" "/nix/store/2nhrwv91g6ycpyxvhmvc0xs8p92wp4bk-nix-2.24.9/bin/nix-env" "--option" "substitute" "false" "-i" "/nix/store/2nhrwv91g6ycpyxvhmvc0xs8p92wp4bk-nix-2.24.9"`, stdout: 
      stderr: installing 'nix-2.24.9'
      error: unable to start build process

Metadata

key	value
version	0.27.0
os	linux
arch	x86_64

[edolstra]

This means that Nix fails in this bit of code:

                /* Drop additional groups here because we can't do it
                   after we've created the new user namespace. */
                if (setgroups(0, 0) == -1) {
                    if (errno != EPERM)
                        throw SysError("setgroups failed");
                    if (settings.requireDropSupplementaryGroups)
                        throw Error("setgroups failed. Set the require-drop-supplementary-groups option to false to skip this step.");
                }

                ProcessOptions options;
                options.cloneFlags = CLONE_NEWPID | CLONE_NEWNS | CLONE_NEWIPC | CLONE_NEWUTS | CLONE_PARENT | SIGCHLD;
                if (privateNetwork)
                    options.cloneFlags |= CLONE_NEWNET;
                if (usingUserNamespace)
                    options.cloneFlags |= CLONE_NEWUSER;

                pid_t child = startProcess([&]() { runChild(); }, options);

I suspect this has something to do with lack of namespace support in the kernel, but it's hard to tell from the error message. I've made NixOS/nix#11664 to help diagnose this in the future.

What Linux distribution is this on?