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* This Week in Spectrum, 2021-W33
@ 2021-08-22 21:30 Alyssa Ross
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From: Alyssa Ross @ 2021-08-22 21:30 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: discuss, devel

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Hi!  I've had a busy day today and am pretty tired, so I'm not sure how
coherent my writing is at the moment.  But I'd rather get this out on
time, especially since tomorrow is also busy today.

As I said last week[1], I took some time off this week as a preventative
measure against burnout.

[1]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/87lf51ybwk.fsf@alyssa.is/


rust-vmm
--------

One of my patches[2] was accepted, but another[3] is still waiting.  As
I said last week, I have more fixes for rust-vmm planned, but want to
let them catch up with the changes I've already sent upstream first so I
know what base I'm using for the next stuff.  I expect the one that's
still waiting to be accepted next week.

[2]: https://github.com/rust-vmm/vmm-sys-util/pull/135
[3]: https://github.com/rust-vmm/vhost/pull/69


spectrum-live
-------------

Last week, I'd just integrated dm-verity into the Spectrum live image
I've been working on.  When it came time to work on the actual root
filesystem, instead of the initramfs, I hit a bit of a brick wall.  I
realised that trying to generate a whole operating system image using
Nix was giving me real writers' block.  There was too much inbetween me
and how the files ended up on disk, and that meant there was too much
overhead to keep in mind when I was thinking about how things should be
designed and laid out.  It might feel like making a Linux root
filesystem should be a solved problem, but Spectrum has a bunch of
special requirements.  You might want to do something like start a VM
for each hardware device of a specific type, and that's something that
isn't really addressed by most standard stuff.  All this stuff is
definitely solveable, but it requires some experimentation to get right,
and Nix was getting a bit in the way of that.

So I created a new directory, and I wrote a Makefile that builds an
ext4 image, and I just started putting files in an etc/ directory.  This
made reasoning about the system way easier, and I was immediately making
progress.

Nix is great for building known targets, and for making customisable
systems (there's no way my Makefile-based system would allow the amount
of customisation I'd easily be able to provide with Nix), but for
experimentation, it's a lot nicer to be closer to the end product.  So
once I know how all this should look I'll make it Nix-aware.

Currently, I have a root filesystem with a service manager that can
respond to hardware appearing and disappearing.  The next (more exciting)
step will be to have it start some VMs, and assign hardware to them
appropriately.  I'm looking forward to getting to that next week.  An
interesting challenge I'll have to solve will be figuring out simple
categories (e.g. "ethernet device") from the huge amount of very
specific information the kernel provides.  I think I might be able
abuse the modules.alias file from the kernel, that defines the mappings
from PCI etc. information to default drivers.  Then all I'll have to do
will be to write mappings from default drivers to whatever categories I
come up with, or what VM I want to assign them to, or whatever.

One neat thing I'm using for the first time here is tar2ext4[4], a
utility program that's part of a larger Microsoft open source project I
don't entirely understand the purpose of.  It's really useful for me
it builds ext4 images entirely in userspace, which will be great for
using in Nix derivations where it's not possible to just mount an ext4
image and write directly to it.  For previous Spectrum experiments, I'd
always used SquashFS[5], entirely because I already knew of a tar2sqfs
program[6] that made creating filesystem images really easy.  I've added
tar2ext4 to Nixpkgs[7], which will hopefully help other people who have
similar problems discover it.

[4]: https://github.com/microsoft/hcsshim/blob/master/cmd/tar2ext4/tar2ext4.go
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SquashFS
[6]: https://github.com/AgentD/squashfs-tools-ng
[7]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/134650


musl
----

While I was working on the root filesystem, I noticed that mount -a,
which mounts all filesystems described in fstab(5), wasn't working.
This turned out to be because of a bug in Musl's implementation of
getmntent(3), a libc function for parsing fstab files.

So I wrote some tests and a fix and sent them to Musl[8].

[8]: https://inbox.vuxu.org/musl/20210821085420.474615-1-hi@alyssa.is/


Hope that all made sense.

Next week, I'll continue working on Spectrum live, and maybe fix the
next rust-vmm issue I have on my todo list if my final outstanding PR
is merged.

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