general high-level discussion about spectrum
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From: Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>
To: Thomas Leonard <talex5@gmail.com>
Cc: Michael Raskin <7c6f434c@mail.ru>, discuss@spectrum-os.org
Subject: Re: New user getting started questions
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2021 07:00:53 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87ble2czx6.fsf@alyssa.is> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAG4opy_hz_ESEpY0TqJy7u3ZSiOOMPWmQkmmDZbi-pjY3cF=YQ@mail.gmail.com>

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Hi!  Thanks for getting in touch. :)

To be honest, I'm surprised you got as far as you did -- like Michael
says, I'm currently working towards a proof of concept, so none of what
you've tried out so far is really meant for use outside of that proof of
concept.

> I've been running Qubes for a few years now and I'd like to give
> Spectrum a try, as I've been having some hardware and performance
> problems with Qubes. Is there some up-to-date guide I can follow? I
> found https://alyssa.is/using-virtio-wl/#demo and was able to see the
> weston terminal. I also tried updating to the latest commit and was
> able to get a nested wayfire window with:
>
>     nix-build . -A spectrumPackages && ./result-3/bin/spectrum-vm
>
> (I'm fairly new to Nix, so not sure if this is the right way to do things)

Pretty close -- spectrumPackages is an attribute set containing lots of
derivations, which is why you end up with lots of numbered result-*
symlinks.  If you do -A spectrumPackages.spectrum-vm it'll just give you
a single result symlink pointing to that, and you won't need to go
hunting for the right one. :)

> I managed to change the keyboard layout, mount a tmpfs for home, and
> increase the memory enough to start firefox, but I haven't managed to
> get much further. Things I tried so far:
>
> - I tried replacing wayfire with weston-terminal, to avoid the nested
> session. But sommelier segfaults when I do that.

I'm surprised -- this has worked for me before, although it's been a
while since I tried this so maybe I changed something.

> - I tried adding `--shared-dir /tmp/ff:ff:type=9p` to share a host
> directory. Then `mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L ff /tmp`
> in the VM seemed to work, but `ls /tmp` crashed the VM.

Yeah, this is a known issue.  I have a patch[1] for it but didn't add it
to the package since I mostly have been working with my own source
builds of crosvm.

[1]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/crosvm/commit/?id=1e318da5b57c12f67bed3b528100dbe4ec287ac5

> - I tried using `-d /dev/mapper/disk` to share an LVM partition, but
> `mount -t ext4 /dev/vdb /tmp` refused to mount it.

Never tried that, so I don't know anything about it I'm afraid.

> - I tried enabling networking with `--host_ip 10.0.0.1`, etc, but it
> said it couldn't create a tap device. I guess it needs more
> privileges.

Yeah, crosvm needs to be CAP_NET_ADMIN for that (which is difficult to
do with Nix).  You can make a TAP device yourself iproute2 and use
--tap-fd to tell crosvm to use it, or you can use the mktuntap program I
wrote (with a privelege drop after running mktuntap), like this:

    sudo mktuntap -pvB 3 \
        sudo -u $USER -C 4 result/bin/spectrum-vm -- --tap-fd 3

> Ideally, I'd like to run a VM with each of my old Qubes filesystems,
> to get back to where I was with my Qubes setup, before investigating
> new spectrum stuff (e.g. one app per VM). Do you have any advice on
> this? I see these lists are a bit quiet - I hope someone is still
> working on this because it sounds great :-)

Like Michael said, there's a lot I need to do before it's really ready
to use like this, but I am working on it (or at least I will be again
once my anti-burnout break ends).  Once I am, I hope to be more active
on the lists again.  I used to post weekly status updates, and would
like to get into doing that again once I'm back because they were a
great way to keep people up to date with the project and for me to have
a record of what I'd been doing.  Reading some of the old status updates
should give you a bit of a feel for where things are, although things
are a bit further along than they were when I wrote the last one because
I put the status updates on hold to try to chase a funding milestone.

Hope that's all clear -- please ask more questions if you have them,
although if it's anything particularly in the weeds I might wait until
I'm back from my break to answer. :)

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2021-01-06  7:01 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 49+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-01-05 19:27 Thomas Leonard
2021-01-05 20:09 ` Michael Raskin
2021-01-06  7:04   ` Alyssa's break Alyssa Ross
2021-01-06  9:11     ` Michał "rysiek" Woźniak
2021-01-06  7:00 ` Alyssa Ross [this message]
2021-01-06 15:56   ` New user getting started questions Thomas Leonard
2021-01-07 11:38     ` Thomas Leonard
2021-01-07 15:33     ` Thomas Leonard
2021-01-14 12:29     ` Alyssa Ross
2021-01-14 12:51       ` Alyssa Ross
2021-01-20 13:04         ` Thomas Leonard
2021-01-27 17:31           ` Thomas Leonard
2021-03-07 12:52             ` Thomas Leonard
2021-03-09 16:59               ` Qubes-lite With KVM and Wayland Alyssa Ross
2021-03-10 14:19                 ` Thomas Leonard
2021-03-10 22:34                   ` Alyssa Ross
2021-03-09 16:25             ` New user getting started questions Alyssa Ross
2021-03-13  7:21               ` Thomas Leonard
2021-03-13 13:52                 ` Alyssa Ross
2021-10-30 12:58                 ` Thomas Leonard
2021-11-03 11:36                   ` Alyssa Ross
2021-11-03 18:27                     ` Thomas Leonard
2021-11-10 12:58                       ` Alyssa Ross
2021-11-10 12:00                         ` Thomas Leonard
2021-11-11 11:09                           ` Alyssa Ross
2021-11-11 16:12                             ` Thomas Leonard
2021-11-12 10:47                               ` Alyssa Ross
2022-03-13 15:08                         ` Thomas Leonard
2022-03-15 14:06                           ` Alyssa Ross
2022-03-15 20:23                             ` Alyssa Ross
2022-03-16 16:18                               ` Using virtio-gpu instead of virtwl Thomas Leonard
2022-03-16 16:54                                 ` Alyssa Ross
2022-03-21 12:10                                 ` Thomas Leonard
2022-03-21 16:05                                   ` Alyssa Ross
2022-03-22 11:08                                     ` Thomas Leonard
2022-03-22 11:16                                       ` Alyssa Ross
2022-03-22 20:05                                         ` Thomas Leonard
2022-04-06 12:19                                           ` Thomas Leonard
2022-04-13 17:12                                             ` Thomas Leonard
2022-04-14 13:57                                               ` Alyssa Ross
2022-04-19 12:58                                                 ` Thomas Leonard
2022-04-19 12:01                                                   ` Alyssa Ross
2022-05-15 15:20                                                 ` Thomas Leonard
2022-05-16 11:55                                                   ` Alyssa Ross
2022-05-18  9:55                                                     ` Thomas Leonard
2022-06-05 16:29                                                       ` Thomas Leonard
2022-08-09 12:00                                     ` Alyssa Ross
2022-10-10 15:16                                       ` Thomas Leonard
2022-10-10 16:53                                         ` Alyssa Ross

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