May 2025 - Spectrum Discuss

This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W21
by Alyssa Ross 25 May '25

25 May '25

Not too much to report this week. I spent most of the week either continuing with my recovery (this was a substantial fraction), or continuing work on future funding — hopefully I'll have good news to share about this at some point. I did update Cloud Hypervisor in Nixpkgs and release new a version of Spectrum's virtio-gpu patches for it. The good news is I'm now basically fully recovered, so should be back to normal from here on, once I've finished getting through the backlog of email. Until next week!

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[ANNOUNCE] cloud-hypervisor-46.0-spectrum0
by Alyssa Ross 25 May '25

25 May '25

I've updated Spectrum's Cloud Hypervisor patches (which add virtio-gpu support) to support Cloud Hypervisor 46.0. More information is available at <https://spectrum-os.org/software/cloud-hypervisor/>.

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This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W20
by Alyssa Ross 18 May '25

18 May '25

I'm still recovering, and it's rough. There are some small signs of progress but it's a bit two steps forward, one step back. But here's what I managed to do this week in spite of things: • Updated[1] the binary cache builder scripts for Scaleway's block storage API migration. (The old one no longer works.) • Finished the networking test[2] I mentioned a couple of updates ago. • Deployed Anubis[3] on https://spectrum-os.org/git/ to stop the server being overloaded by AI scrapers. I'm unhappy it's come to this, but it made me feel better to realise it only activates on things that look like graphical web browsers, so curl, lynx, etc. still get through fine. • Dropped the hack[4] Spectrum had for loading device trees on aarch64 where they were spread across more than a dozen UKI extensions, thanks to systemd having dropped the limit of how many each UKI could include after I brought it up[5]. • Tested and merged a crosvm update in Nixpkgs[6]. • Finished some work to support encrypted user data partitions. This was a big blocker preventing Spectrum being really useful for anything. Currently, partitions have to be manually mounted on the command line, but I could imagine there being a nice GUI for this that runs on boot, a bit like what Tails has, since the OS itself doesn't have to be encrypted. • Discovered that the main blocker I knew about for building Spectrum for RISC-V had been resolved, so did some very early work for having Nixpkgs support RISC-V musl builds[7][8][9]. This one was a bit of a happy accident of my surgery recovery — I only tried it again on a lark because I wasn't well enough at the time to do anything else, and then made the happy discovery. Probably won't pursue this any more for a while, because apart from anything else obtaining RISC-V hardware at the moment isn't easy, but it's nice to know it's now theoretically possible. • Demi Marie Obenour helped me figure out that passthrough of Wi-Fi devices to VMs was not broken for complicated reasons to do with Cloud Hypervisor's VFIO implementation like I thought, but for simpler reasons: passthrough to a Fedora VM works, so it must just be some sort of misconfiguration in the Spectrum VM that should be relatively straightforward to narrow down and fix. I had tried to test passthrough to other guest OSes before, but since then I discovered that my main laptop has a faulty Wi-Fi card, so I suspect that produced confusing results that made me think it was something more complicated. • Continued work on arranging future funding for Spectrum. [1]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/infra/commit/?id=df2824a8e19c16a27adb951f664a53… [2]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/tree/release/checks/networking?id=879b… [3]: https://anubis.techaro.lol/ [4]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=e06b57f4fefc834f4868540a53d… [5]: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/8c5b359579b0f1029edafb0bd96b5ebfb… [6]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/408305 [7]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/406797 [8]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/406966 [9]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/406996 Looking back at that list now, I'm pretty happy! Even though I was struggling for a lot of the week that's not too bad overall. Maybe I'm even happy enough with it that I feel justified including this bit again for the first time since the surgery: As a reminder, you can support my work by donating to Spectrum's development through GitHub Sponsors[10] or Liberapay[11]. This helps a lot, especially with ongoing maintenance (usually fixing upstream bugs etc.) that is difficult to fund via a grant. [10]: https://github.com/sponsors/alyssais/ [11]: https://liberapay.com/qyliss Until next week!

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This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W19
by Alyssa Ross 11 May '25

11 May '25

Sadly this week has mostly been a continuation of the last — I'm still recovering from dental surgery. I spent the early part of the week in too much pain to think about much else, and the later part of the week in less pain but now struggling with side effects from painkillers. From what I understand there's not anything to worry about, but I've hit some bad luck and ended up with much worse and longer lasting pain than would usually be expected from this. So this isn't going to be the type of comprehensive report I'd like to be sending out every week, but I'll list some things I have been able to get done in those moments where I've been able to focus. • Updated Spectrum's pinned Nixpkgs and made some small improvements (mostly not committed yet) as a result of improvements in updated packages. • Got the automated test I was working on to the point where it's actually testing something useful — that networking works. Still want to polish it a bit more when I can focus better before I commit it. • Made a release of the Cloud Hypervisor virtio-gpu patches[1]. • Some long overdue work on the server that among other things hosts the Spectrum website, git repos, etc. • Reported a GTK regression that has made testing Spectrum very annoying for the last few months[2]. • Tested a crosvm update in Nixpkgs. • Worked on arranging continuing funding for Spectrum. [1]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-discuss/877c2owzjl.fsf@alys… [2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/7544 Most of this stuff has been in the last 2-3 days, so hopefully I'm on a good trajectory, but I don't know how long it's going to be before I'm back to normal.

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[ANNOUNCE] cloud-hypervisor-45.0-spectrum0
by Alyssa Ross 10 May '25

10 May '25

I've updated Spectrum's Cloud Hypervisor patches (which add virtio-gpu support) to support Cloud Hypervisor 45.0. More information is available at <https://spectrum-os.org/software/cloud-hypervisor/>.

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This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W18
by Alyssa Ross 04 May '25

04 May '25

This week started off well — I was continuing working on the automated test I mentioned last week — but then I had two wisdom teeth removed and recovery has been hellish. So not much to report. I've fixed a couple of Nixpkgs things where I could but mostly I've been out of action. The other two are going to need to be removed sometime in the near future too… But hey, at least I've achieved my goal of a concise update!

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