July 2025 - Spectrum Discuss

https://spectrum-os.org blocking Tor: is this intentional?
by Demi Marie Obenour 30 Jul '25

30 Jul '25

I noticed that https://spectrum-os.org doesn't work from Tor. Is this intentional? -- Sincerely, Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)

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This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W30
by Alyssa Ross 28 Jul '25

28 Jul '25

This week, Demi and I continued the review of the patches adding PipeWire to guests, now on their seventh revision[1], with some preparatory patches having already been applied[2][3]. She also opened a couple of Cloud Hypervisor PRs[4][5], one of which adds support for a generic vhost-user device. This would be a very exciting feature for Cloud Hypervisor to gain, because it would mean using new kinds of vhost-user device with Cloud Hypervisor wouldn't require any Cloud Hypervisor modifications. I believe (but we haven't confirmed yet) that this should allow using a vhost-user-sound device with Cloud Hypervisor straight away, and eventually allow us to drop our patches for GPU support altogether, although that also requires some extra vhost-user messages to be standardised (an effort which is still ongoing[6]). [1]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/263f81f2-9e86-4bb1-be… [2]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=b3cb2511d3612a1d58246fabdc6… [3]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=560fd878ba1bbd8df0fe28488e7… [4]: https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor/pull/7221 [5]: https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor/pull/7223 [6]: https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/20250609144729.884027-1-aesteve@redhat.c… As for me, aside from reviewing and applying some of Demi's fixes, I updated Spectrum's pinned Nixpkgs[7] and released a new version of the Cloud Hypervisor patches[8], and did the usual round of server updates. Sometimes, updating the pinned Nixpkgs is easy, otherwise, due to a change that looked entirely inconsequential upstream, it can take a lot of work, and this has been one of the latter variety, so I'm glad it's finally done. Since then, and having just returned home from a couple of months of travelling, I've been feeling very tired. A few weeks ago[8], I mentioned that I'd been thinking I might have to calm things down a bit for myself to make sure I'm on the right side of burnout, and I think now is probably the time for that, so I'd expect there won't be much direct progress from me for the next week or two, although I should still be keeping up with emails — feeling like I'd come back to a mountain of them would be much worse than just dealing with them roughly as they come in — and doing what I can to make sure nobody else is blocked. [7]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=d0a5f0abdc356f1bba676d489ba… [8]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-discuss/87o6twmg2p.fsf@alys… See you soon!

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[ANNOUNCE] cloud-hypervisor-47.0-spectrum0
by Alyssa Ross 23 Jul '25

23 Jul '25

I've updated Spectrum's Cloud Hypervisor patches (which add virtio-gpu support) to support Cloud Hypervisor 47.0. More information is available at <https://spectrum-os.org/software/cloud-hypervisor/>.

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This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W29
by Alyssa Ross 21 Jul '25

21 Jul '25

The main thing that's been happening this week is a lot of back and forth between Demi and me on PipeWire in VMs. The series is now in its fifth iteration[1], and is shaping up well. I'm happy that we're discussing it on the list so much, because it will make it easy to refer back to in future for context of why decisions were made. For my part, I've been mostly trying to find solutions to problems Demi has been encountering as she gets set up to work on Spectrum. To that end, I fixed a couple of build issues that occurred when KVM wasn't available[2][3], removed the need to remember to run "make clean" after modifying the list of installed packages to avoid ending up with a broken build[4], and spent some time trying to debug why QEMU's virtio-gpu implementation doesn't seem to work nearly as well as crosvm's, despite them being built on the same code. (I haven't made much progress with the latter though — I have a gut feeling it's a memory safety problem, but running Valgrind on QEMU has so far been painful.) I also figured out and fixed the Cloud Hypervisor bug[5] I mentioned last week, so once we update Cloud Hypervisor, the file chooser portal no longer intermittently fails to configure itself, and I did the usual server updates and Nixpkgs maintenance. Yureka has been making progress with forwarding packets out of a network driver VM to host userspace, where we plan to do routing with the aim to later move it into a VM as well. She's also started working on implementing a vhost-user backend, which is how the host userspace router will get packets to and from the application VMs. Sounds like it's still very much in the experimental phase, so there's no public code to link to for any of this as yet. [1]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/a7325ee5-eb7f-458c-9b… [2]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=1b33fcabdad8e4b76587848ad29… [3]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=89b80752a275a4ca1818a49d86f… [4]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=c1e1449b2173913f08828bafc62… [5]: https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor/commit/ec8fceb4a6a537c… Until next week! I'll be at BornHack until Wednesday morning, so if you are too and want to talk about Spectrum, get in touch. :)

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This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W28
by Alyssa Ross 14 Jul '25

14 Jul '25

This week, I finally finished the networking fixes I've kept mentioning for the last few weeks. Now, if the VMM for the network provider VM exits for whatever reason, it's possible to recover without rebooting the whole system. I've also fixed running AppImages, which had recently regressed, and added a test for that functionality to ensure it doesn't happen again. Along the way came various improvements to Spectrum's integration test framework. As I work on tests and the test framework, each new test is easier than the last, and it's a great feeling! Now, I'm looking into a Cloud Hypervisor bug that causes Spectrum's File Chooser portal implementation to intermittently not work. When that's fixed, I of course already have a Spectrum regression test ready for that too. In this case, because it only doesn't work some of the time, having a test that can (usually) reproduce it has made debugging so much easier than trying to reproduce by hand. I investigated a couple more newly introduced Nixpkgs regressions that affected Spectrum. One was a crosvm segfault on startup, caused by minijail not taking into account that kernel headers could include features not available on the running kernel. They already had a fix, and tagged a new release including it when I asked, but sadly it seems that the regression will be reintroduced next time a new kernel version is added[1]. :( [1]: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/minijail/c/7YR25MbzGG0 Demi continued working towards sound in Spectrum. She sent another revision of her patch to run PipeWire in guests[2], and sent a large batch of security fixes upstream to PipeWire[3], some of which have already been accepted[4]. She also continued her work fixing unsoundness in Cloud Hyprevisor with a PR[5] to the rust-vmm vfio crate, and started a discussion in the review thread for the specification of the virtio-media device about its security properties[6]. [2]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/638beeaa-2351-4f51-81… [3]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/merge_requests/2423 [4]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/merge_requests/2423#note… [5]: https://github.com/rust-vmm/vfio/pull/103 [6]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/67378956-e1dd-4d7f-9b… See you next week!

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This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W27
by Alyssa Ross 07 Jul '25

07 Jul '25

This week was the beginning of an unusually problematic Nixpkgs staging cycle, which required quite a lot of my attention to try to keep Spectrum buildable. There's sadly more to do, as I've just noticed a newly introduced crosvm segfault… I also put some time into a Nixpkgs policy proposal to try to move towards better package quality and maintenance[1]. When I've had gaps from working on that, I've continued working on the networking fixes I've been mentioning for the last couple of weeks. They're now extremely close to done, and I was already able to push some improvements[2][3][4] to our integration test framework (which I continue to be delighted to now have). There was a discussion[5] on the list about how to reduce the volume of spam coming through. I've made some changes based on that now, and also sent some Nixpkgs PRs to fix some issues I found in the NixOS SpamAssassin module. Since those changes, nothing has come through that shouldn't have, but we'll see how it goes from here… [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/421201 [2]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=f8eca3ab3d8e59dd49be7b81735… [3]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=048d4033736443efd7a53340e75… [4]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=93afadc8ed1fe508ca1021346d1… [5]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-discuss/uvn7j3n4fppxeqjof4l… Demi's Cloud Hypervisor soundness fixes[6] are basically done for now, and are mostly waiting for review from other reviewers. She also sent a second version of her patch to run PipeWire in Spectrum application VMs[7], although I believe there's a third version still to come, and while at it sent an upstream MR[8] with some security fixes for PipeWire! [6]: https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor/pull/7129 [7]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/a951f755-3e7d-4236-93… [8]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/merge_requests/2423 With all the conferences and working on future funding I've been doing recently (which has calmed down a bit for now), I might need to take it easy for a bit to be proactive about burnout. Not sure how that'll look exactly yet, although it's unlikely I'll spend any time /completely/ away to make sure the project keeps ticking along. See you next week! Upstream Nixpkgs PRs from me, relevant to Spectrum -------------------------------------------------- https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/421760 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/421796 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/421797 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/421798 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422001 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422003 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422018 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422913 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422916 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/422973 Upstream contributions from me, relevant to Spectrum ---------------------------------------------------- https://github.com/dbry/WavPack/pull/205 https://github.com/dosfstools/dosfstools/pull/218 https://github.com/jqlang/jq/pull/3365 https://github.com/libical/libical/pull/930 https://github.com/libical/libical/pull/932 https://gitlab.com/grobian/html2text/-/merge_requests/57 https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gettext/2025-07/msg00007.html https://lore.kernel.org/linux-bluetooth/20250703182908.2370130-1-hi@alyssa.…

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Anti-spam.
by Dom (shymega) Rodriguez 02 Jul '25

02 Jul '25

Hi, Is there a way to block the spam coming in on the Spectrum lists? It goes to Junk mail on my end, but I'm awfully aware that others may not be so lucky. I've setup a few mail servers with rspamd for tech groups before - but my knowledge is a little rusty. No pun intended. Just wondering if we can brainstorm some ways to counteract the spam coming in - particularly on devel. Best wishes, -- Dom Rodriguez

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