Hi everyone, I can confirm that wlan0 device is now visible in the netvm! So now someone just needs to add some kind of wpa_supplicant/iwd in the netvm (I believe there is already a task dedicated to it in the NLnet grant(s) planned). Besides that, I have encountered a bug on two devices (ThinkPad X270 and ThinkPad X390, incidentally both with i915 GPUs) where the device freezes on the tty at the point where weston would start, with no blinking cursor. It seems to happen reliably on some spectrum live images, but then it does reliably not happen on others without any real change in between except changes to the bundled AppVMs. Maybe it's a race condition depending on the way the image is packed? A workaround that Alyssa recommended and which worked was adding nomodeset to the command line options, but we're still working on tracking down the cause. — Yureka On 6/9/25 12:16, Alyssa Ross wrote:
Once again, a lot of focus this week was on arranging future funding for Spectrum. Everything is submitted for now, so hopefully I'll have more time for fun things now. One thing I did get done was fixing a test that I noticed had accidentally been removed from the release build a while ago. It had bitrotted quite a bit in the meantime, so I spent a while gradually fixing it on increasingly more recent versions of Spectrum until it worked again on the main branch[1], and now it's part of the release build again[2].
[1]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=88acfe0da9f9255948e3f7c83205... [2]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=a4e3a407a62319b44619cc7b9395...
A team presented a Spectrum-based demo at the Direction interministérielle du Numérique Hack Days[3], showing several instances of an application running concurrently in different VMs. They booted Spectrum on an assortment of hardware, and ran into an issue I'd seen before where Intel wireless devices were not fully configured. Yureka was able to debug this enough to determine that the iwlmvm driver was not being automatically loaded, and that was enough for me to figure out the underlying problem, which was that the kernel was not able to dynamically load modules using modprobe as a usermode helper, because it tries to run /sbin/modprobe by default and Spectrum VMs had no /sbin. This is now fixed[4], although I don't think anybody has had a chance to retest Intel wireless devices — I'm travelling and don't have the hardware with me. If anybody wants to try and report back:
1. Boot Spectrum[5] on a system with Intel wireless hardware. 2. In a terminal, run: vm-start sys.netvm && vm-console sys.netvm 3. In the sys.netvm console window that opens, run: ip link
If a wireless device shows up, the bug is fixed.
[3]: https://hackdays.numerique.gouv.fr/en [4]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=96adb87dfbf00accdc1af86befb6... [5]: https://spectrum-os.org/doc/installation/getting-spectrum.html#installing-sp...
Demi has been continuing working on trying to solve the x86_64 virtio-iommu interrupt remapping, by beginning a proof of concept implementation of her draft spec[6] in Cloud Hypervisor. She also spent some time investigating how we might provide camera access to applications in future, with the aim to both protect applications against malicious hardware, and hardware against malicious applications; and wrote it up on the list[7]. As the number of people working on Spectrum grows, we're going to need to be doing a lot more planning in advance for collaboration (and funding) to go smoothly, so it's great to see this research being done. Even if it will be a while before it's time to focus on cameras, thinking about how it will work now helps identify dependencies on fundamentals that we might want to get the ball rolling on quite soon, especially those that require standards discussions or other work with upstreams and might have a longer lead time.
[6]: https://lore.kernel.org/virtio-comment/ebeef135-1b87-4834-ad8d-5bb76554baa2@... [7]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/878qm6cngn.fsf@alyssa....
I'll be at DevConf.CZ in Brno next week, and then OW2'con[8] in Paris and NGI Forum[9] in Brussels the following week. Get in touch with me on Matrix (@qyliss:fairydust.space) if we should talk at any of those. :)
[8]: https://www.ow2con.org/view/2025/ [9]: https://ngi.eu/ngi-forum25/
Until next week!