May 2020 - Spectrum Development

This Week in Spectrum, 2020-W19
by Alyssa Ross 10 May '20

10 May '20

This week, I want to give a special shoutout to Cole Helbling, who sent three patches to improve our documentation. Non-Alyssa Spectrum patches are quite rare at the moment, so it was very very nice to get these all at once. Thanks Cole! This week has mostly been tidying up loose ends and working on documentation. But there's some good, concrete progress as well. Website ------- <https://spectrum-os.org/> now links directly to my blog and This Week in Spectrum, so that people who come to the website can more easily see that development is ongoing and progress is being made[1]. I've also made it a little more obvious how to find the IRC channel and mailing lists from the homepage[2], because a conversation on the fediverse made me realise that wasn't clear at all before. Cole fixed the advice in the website's CONTRIBUTING file on sending patches for the website[3]. I had written to set Git's "sendemail.subjectPrefix" configuration option, but the option is actually called "format.subjectPrefix". Cole fixed a broken link[4], and I made the incorrect URL redirect to the right one as well, just in case. [1]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/www/commit/?id=8f37213cfd4d5dbd4a982bfc1899a3b3… [2]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/www/commit/?id=6d1ce779016cd84c0413b225355715e5… [3]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/www/commit/?id=8f37213cfd4d5dbd4a982bfc1899a3b3… [4]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/www/commit/?id=13c860e1e5bb02fce683012b851c4451… Developer manual ---------------- Did you know there's a developer manual[5] for Spectrum? There's not a lot in there yet, so for now it might not be all that useful, but it will be one day! I added a section about how to hack on Spectrum's crosvm, because it can be a bit non-obvious how to get up and running with it. I got some great feedback on it on IRC, and a diff from Cole with some fixes. Thanks to everybody who gave me feedback and helped get that documentation into shape. Setting up a crosvm build still isn't all that easy, but at least it's documented. [5]: https://spectrum-os.org/doc/developer-manual.html Infrastructure -------------- Two(?) people trying to clone all of Nixpkgs from the tiny VPS running spectrum-os.org caused the server to run out of memory and return 504 to those clones. It's quite important that people are able to get Spectrum's code, so I've arranged for the VPS to be upgraded with more memory, and so now I just need to reboot the machine so it picks it up. I plan on doing this tomorrow, since there's less likely to be mailing list traffic then than there is immediately after I send this. In the medium term I'll host all this stuff on a more sensible machine, because it's quite clear the workload on this server (which also runs some other stuff) is starting to get beyond the "tiny VPS" territory. IRC --- Activity in #spectrum has really picked up all of a sudden. Hundreds of messages were sent in the second half of this week, mostly talking either about Spectrum or about the future of secure computing in general, and I'm extremely here for all of it. The best thing is that I wasn't even around for most of these conversations! It's hugely motivating to me to feel that people are so interested in Spectrum, and it's great to have people with all sorts of useful knowledge and questions around. If you weren't there, I recommend actually checking out the logs from this period[6], because the conversations being had were just a great read full of interesting stuff. #spectrum feels like it's now at the point where you can start a discussion about secure computing, and be confident that you'll get at least a couple of extremely knowledgeable people involved in the conversation, and that's just fantastic. [6]: https://logs.spectrum-os.org/spectrum/2020-05-06 Wayfire ------- I replaced Sway in the test VM derivation with our newly packaged Wayfire. I was worried at first because wf-shell wasn't starting properly, but strace helped me realise that wf-shell likes HOME to be set, and I hadn't actually done that in the VMs yet. So now that works. There hasn't been much movement on my Wayfire PRs, or my PR to add Wayfire to upstream Nixpkgs, and that's down to me. I felt like after working on it all week last week, I needed a bit of a break. I'll try to get back to it next week so all those PRs can be gotten over the line. crosvm ------ I merged the latest crosvm changes from Google into Spectrum's crosvm tree. Doing this at the moment takes quite a while, because my work-in-progress "interguest" branch has about 50 commits that have to be rebased onto the new master, and quite a lot of those usually result in conflicts. This won't be as much of a problem once that code is ready to be included in master, because updating then will just be a single merge commit, but for now it's a bit of a pain, especially since I try to make sure every commit works. I haven't had much of a look over what's changed yet. There's usually at least one cool new toy to be excited about when I merge Google's crosvm, though, so I look forward to finding out what it is this time. I think that's it for this week, although honestly there have been so many different things going on I've probably missed something. Hopefully next week will be a bit more focused and I'll make more progress with interguest communication. This week, though, we've made some great improvements in several important areas. I'm optimistic that the increased IRC and patch volume are a sign of things to come. I'm looking forward to seeing where things will go from here. :)

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[PATCH www] CONTRIBUTING: fix `git config` suggestion
by Cole Helbling 09 May '20

09 May '20

format-patch is the component that adds to the prefix, not send-email. --- CONTRIBUTING | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING b/CONTRIBUTING index 2f1f8b2..7ec8fba 100644 --- a/CONTRIBUTING +++ b/CONTRIBUTING @@ -23,8 +23,8 @@ automatically prepend a prefix to the subject line of every patch message sent by it in a given repository. You can configure it by running the following command in this Git repository: - git config sendemail.subjectPrefix "PATCH www" + git config format.subjectPrefix "PATCH www" From now on, git-send-email(1) will automatically add "[PATCH www]" to the start of every patch sent for this repository, instead of the -default "[PATCH]". \ No newline at end of file +default "[PATCH]". -- 2.26.2

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[PATCH] doc: fix 404ing link
by Cole Helbling 09 May '20

09 May '20

--- doc/index.html | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/doc/index.html b/doc/index.html index c8dea1d..812793b 100644 --- a/doc/index.html +++ b/doc/index.html @@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ <ul> <li><a href="https://spectrum-os.org/doc/developer-manual.html">Developer manual</a> - <li><a href="https://spectrum-os.org/doc/crosvm">crosvm rustdoc</a> + <li><a href="https://spectrum-os.org/doc/crosvm/crosvm/">crosvm rustdoc</a> </ul> <p> -- 2.26.2

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This week in Spectrum, 2020-W18
by Alyssa Ross 03 May '20

03 May '20

A belated Happy International Workers' Day. :) I had some other stuff going on this week but I'm still happy with what I got done. Wayfire ------- I've been working on packaging Wayfire in Nixpkgs so we can use it in Spectrum. (See last week's update for why I've chosen Wayfire for this.) This has required quite a bit of work on Wayfire itself, because up until now Wayfire has assumed that every component, including plugins, will be installed into Wayfire's prefix. With Nix, a package's prefix is only writable by that package, so we need to make some changes to Wayfire to support each component having its own prefix. This is necessary even for our simple case because even a basic Wayfire setup has at least one plugin to provide the desktop shell. Everything is supposed to be a plugin, after all. And we'll want to add our own plugins at some point. To implement plugins in other search paths, I added two environment variables WAYFIRE_PLUGIN_PATH (for libraries) and WAYFIRE_PLUGIN_XML_PATH (for the XML files that define Wayfire plugin options). These are then searched in addition to Wayfire's prefix. Support for plugins coming from multiple prefixes required some small changes in several parts of the Wayfire ecosystem. Wayfire has so far proven to be a very friendly upstream. They understood the problem I was having, even though it's less of an issue on traditional distributions, and I always got quick answers on IRC when I needed to ask for advice on implementing the search paths. Here's the issue I filed describing the need for search paths: https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/issues/493 And here are all the pull requests I made to implement them across the ecosystem: https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/pull/496 https://github.com/WayfireWM/wf-config/pull/25 https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/pull/497 https://github.com/WayfireWM/wf-shell/pull/52 https://github.com/WayfireWM/wf-shell/pull/53 https://github.com/WayfireWM/wcm/pull/17 https://github.com/WayfireWM/wf-shell/pull/54 https://github.com/WayfireWM/wcm/pull/18 With these changes, I can have Wayfire all nicely packaged up. We can even provide a nice Nix interface for configuring a Wayfire with some specific plugins: (wayfireApplications.withPlugins (plugins: with plugins; [ wf-shell ])).wayfire I made a pull request to add Wayfire, with the interface demonstrated above, to Nixpkgs: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/86606 Unbeknownst to me, while I was working on this, another PR was also opened to add the latest version of Wayfire to Nixpkgs: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/86569 This PR does a good job of making the basic Wayfire installation work, but it doesn't support extra plugins. Still, it's likely that if this had been available before I started my work, it would have been good enough for us for now. This sort of thing is always a risk, and even if I hadn't done the Wayfire work now I'd have had to come back later anyway to do plugins, so it's not too bad. The author of that PR and I have agreed to work together from here to get Wayfire into Nixpkgs, using my PR as a base because it has the plugins support. So, hopefully by the time I write my next status update all my Wayfire pull requests will have been merged, and Wayfire will be in Nixpkgs. Reviews on the Nixpkgs PR in particular are very much appreciated. :) From here, I'll start trying to modify Wayfire/wlroots to make it request host memory rather than allocating its own, as described in last week's status update. I had a quick look, and it appears that there aren't many places these allocations are happening, so hopefully that shouldn't require too much modification. Then, we should be able to run an application in one VM, displayed on a compositor in another. :)

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