- Spectrum Discuss - spectrum-os.org

Action required from Matrix users in #spectrum:libera.chat
by Alyssa Ross 21 Jul '23

21 Jul '23

Some time in the next week, the #spectrum:libera.chat Matrix room is going to stop working, as a result of a dispute between Libera.Chat and matrix.org[1]. So, unfortunately, if you want to keep using Matrix to participate in the Spectrum chat, you need to take some action: 1. Leave #spectrum:libera.chat 2. Join #spectrum:fairydust.space It's very important to do it in that order, because otherwise the bridge gets confused and bad things happen. If something goes wrong, rejoin either channel, ask for help, and we'll figure it out. On the positive side, the new Matrix room is controlled by me, rather than by the administrators of the Matrix-Libera bridge. This means we can have nice things like room history, and if something like this happens again (needing to use a different bridge, moving IRC network, etc.), I should be able to use my room admin powers to change the setup transparently, without any action being required from individual Matrix users. So this is hopefully the last time I'm going to have to ask Matrix users to join a new room. [1]: https://libera.chat/news/matrix-deportalling

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Help wanted: organising community calls
by Alyssa Ross 18 Apr '23

18 Apr '23

An annoying longstanding problem with Spectrum is that I do a lot of very interesting work, but I'm not very good at keeping people following the project informed about it. Over the years I've tried writing status updates, but it's really difficult for me to do them consistently. The community calls we've had a couple of are a good format for me, especially because they're interactive, but the potential attendees change over time, depending on who's interested in the project at the moment, and so it's important to work with their schedules to make sure enough people come to make it worthwhile. That means that organising the call is yet another task I should do on a schedule, and struggle with. So, I was wondering if there's somebody out there who's better at sticking to schedules and would be able to help with this part. It really just involves making the scheduling poll, sending out an email about it, and then checking the responses when the poll closes to pick the meeting time, and sending out another email announcing that time. Ideally, I think we'd have a community call every month. If that sounds like that something that would be easier for you than it is for me, it would be lovely if you could get in touch in any of the normal ways. :)

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Spectrum community call, March 2023
by Alyssa Ross 07 Mar '23

07 Mar '23

Hi! I'm organising another community call, trying to make these a regular thing. There's not quite enough time left to organise one in February taking into account when people are available, so it'll be in March. This is a call, open to anybody who wants to attend, to ask questions about Spectrum, talk about any related work they're doing or interested in doing, etc. If you'd like to come, please fill in this poll to indicate when works for you: https://www.systemli.org/poll/#/poll/tYCYsBFri1/participation?encryptionKey… (Note that responses are public.)

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Various updates from me
by Alyssa Ross 04 Feb '23

04 Feb '23

Some deliberately brief updates so I can actually get all this written down finally: First, December was my last month working at Unikie. Some annoying German bureaucratic quirks unfortunately got in the way and made things difficult for me. My understanding is that they plan to continue working with and contributing to Spectrum. Former Unikie colleagues, I'm looking forward to continuing to work with you. :) Relatedly, I'd like to organise another community call soon, as the last one was really good. I'd have liked to do one in January too, but too many non-work things getting in the way meant I wasn't able to make that happen. But let's keep them going with a call in February. More on this soon. This also means that, for the time being, I'm once again funding my work on Spectrum through community donations. (But as previously promised, all the money I raised while I was working for Unikie will remain set aside.) Please consider supporting my work on Spectrum through https://github.com/sponsors/alyssais or https://liberapay.com/qyliss. Hopefully I'll have more to share soon on other sources of funding. What I've been doing recently: I spent December getting the foundations of virtio-gpu support into upstream rust-vmm[1], and January doing work on Nixpkgs. It would be a big win for development experience if I could get rid of all of Spectrum's modifications in upstream Nixpkgs, so I've been working towards that. I'm taking a bit of a roundabout route because I need to be able to demonstrate why the changes are useful in ways that aren't specific to Spectrum — as a result of this, I've actually been working a bit on improving Nixpkgs' FreeBSD support, since it shares some characteristics with Spectrum that most Linux systems wouldn't. (Non-systemd udev implementation, for example.) [1]: https://github.com/rust-vmm/vm-virtio/commits/c527b45dada0a81d343aca7f06759… Upcoming challenges I'm thinking about: - Way too much of my time at the moment is spent doing QA — making sure new Nixpkgs updates or kernels aren't going to introduce regressions in Spectrum. We do some unusual things, so can't rely on other people to catch problems before they affect us. I want to get some automated testing against upstreams sorted out, so I can free up more of my time for working on documentation and features, which is what I really want to be doing but am fighting for time for at the moment. Getting to 0 Nixpkgs patches is part of this. - I want to improve the experience for other contributors — I know it's lacking in various ways. I think the quickest win here will be to figure out a way to let people join the Spectrum chat through Matrix without being kicked after 30 days of inactivity (which is what the Libera bridge does). I've been told there are various alternative ways we could have this work. Having reliable real-time chat is pretty critical for collaboration, and it's become especially clear, especially after winter holidays, that we don't quite have that at the moment. Also, I'll be at FOSDEM this weekend. Get in touch on IRC (qyliss on libera) or Matrix (@qyliss:fairydust.space) if you want to say hello.

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Upcoming Spectrum community call
by Alyssa Ross 29 Nov '22

29 Nov '22

Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 12:00 UTC I will be holding an experimental Spectrum community call. The idea here is that it gives all participants in the Spectrum community (interested users, developers, etc.) the chance to meet and talk about upcoming development work. So if you would like to hear or ask questions about where Spectrum is going, or if you're working on Spectrum (or would like to be!) and want to share what you're doing, please join us tomorrow at the following URL: https://meet.jit.si/moderated/f20761163cb82478c3cc28dbffc1edcd788d8766232fa… Since somebody has asked already: I don't plan on recording this call. If it goes well and we make this a regular thing, we can discuss at that point whether calls should be recorded.

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Feature to bridge host network from netvm and other vm
by Juha Park 23 Nov '22

23 Nov '22

Hello. In the spectrum OS, as far as I know, all appvms will connect to outside through netvm. And each appvm has different subnet. However, sometimes, a app should be able to access the host network by bridging. For example, an P2P app needs to send and receive multicast or broadcast to find other peers. I wonder if it(bridging to host network) is possible in spectrum OS model, and if possible, I want to know how to do it. And if there is no such feature, I want to know the plan or opinion to support such app in spectrum OS. Thanks.

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Documentation of aarch64 port on Spectrum OS upstream
by Ville Ilvonen 23 Nov '22

23 Nov '22

Hi, We've built the wayland demo branch on aarch64 port and added some other apps on it to showcase embedded virtualization with Spectrum OS. The build configuration for the reference device is documented [1] with the out-of-tree build configuration as agreed in our earlier discussion[2]. There's also some additional accompanied documentation on binary cache we have used with aarch64 and could be of general use. I'd like to see that documentation upstreamed as much as possible. Would it make sense to link this work from Spectrum documentation? To indicate work in progress aarch64 support with known issues on a ref. device and avoid forking this documentation? The practical benefit is that anyone interested in building Spectrum OS for an aarch64 device using vendor BSP would have some reference linked from Spectrum OS documentation - e.g. an initial porting guide as even the x86_64 does not yet use the build configuration. Additionally, I don't want to fragment Spectrum OS ports and their documentation further than necessary. Best, -Ville [1] https://github.com/tiiuae/spectrum-config-imx8/blob/main/README.md [2] https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-discuss/CAP-nJwHTmROzMbyYNt…

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New user getting started questions
by Thomas Leonard 10 Oct '22

10 Oct '22

Hi, 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) 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 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. - I tried using `-d /dev/mapper/disk` to share an LVM partition, but `mount -t ext4 /dev/vdb /tmp` refused to mount it. - 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. 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 :-) Thanks! -- talex5 (GitHub/Twitter) http://roscidus.com/blog/ GPG: 5DD5 8D70 899C 454A 966D 6A51 7513 3C8F 94F6 E0CC

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Wayland security contexts demo
by Alyssa Ross 03 Oct '22

03 Oct '22

Puck has created a video demonstrating the work she's been doing with the in-development Wayland security-context protocol [1], which allows a Wayland compositor to distinguish between applications running in different sandboxes (e.g. in different VMs). The video is available at https://diode.zone/w/2n3kKNNjXFkSWUwyjT3hgt Or alternatively, magnet:?xt=urn:btih:f340dfd391be0cabbb0638eb8af6659214c5d821&dn=puck%27s%20video%20720p.mp4&tr=https%3A%2F%2Fdiode.zone%2Ftracker%2Fannounce&ws=https%3A%2F%2Fdiode.zone%2Fstatic%2Fstreaming-playlists%2Fhls%2F0b093345-a100-4051-b4c3-37292af48c81%2F176adb94-167a-4cb7-b954-a09b301c4d80-720-fragmented.mp4 As part of this work, she updated the draft wlroots and Sway implementations to support the latest proposed version of the protocol, exposed the security context information to Sway configuration hooks, and created a draft crosvm implementation of exposing security context information to the compositor. There's some more information in Puck's post to the Spectrum development mailing list. [2] Thanks to NLnet and NGI Zero for funding this project. [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/68 [2]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/5cf20f6f-9d89-4cf9-91…

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Puck is doing a talk at the Qubes OS summit tomorrow
by Alyssa Ross 09 Sep '22

09 Sep '22

The Qubes OS summit will be held in Berlin from tomorrow (Friday) until Sunday. I'll be attending, and Puck will be giving a talk at 15:20 tomorrow. Puck's talk is called "Isolating GUIs with the power of Wayland", and the abstract is: Could Qubes OS replace its custom GUI isolation protocol with Wayland while staying as performant and secure? With the advent of Wayland, many strides have been made in the desktop Linux space, limiting the effects a malicious application can have. Gone are the days of every application being able to snoop every keypress! This presentation will dive into the differences between X and Wayland, and why it makes for a great fit in isolating operating systems like Qubes OS and Spectrum. The talk will be live streamed at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_djHbyjuJvhVjfT18nyqmQ iCalendar file for the talk: https://cfp.3mdeb.com/qubes-os-summit-2022/talk/ZY8KHW.ics

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