It was quite a week. Yureka and I were at XDC from Monday until Wednesday. My talk, "An upstream-first approach to application virtualization", was on Tuesday, and the video is now online[1]. I didn't learn that much at the conference that was directly relevant to Spectrum, but I was interested to learn from a lightning talk that kmscon has been revived and was recently repackaged in Fedora[2]. I'm still getting used to public speaking again, so the talk wasn't as smooth as I'd have liked, but it was okay. After XDC, I stopped by the Systems Meetup Dresden[3] and did a lighting talk. This one went much better, but wasn't recorded, so you'll just have to believe me. While we were away, All Systems Go[4] (AIUI basically the systemd conference) took place in Berlin, and that meant a lot of Linux mobile/desktop people were in town who are not normally. We were able to get together over the following days, and in particular we had some good conversations about what the future of Flatpak/Portals might look like. It's great to be in the room for this sort of thing because it means Spectrum's needs can be considered from the start. The designs being considered would solve our biggest pain points, so I'm optimistic, but there's of course the question of momentum / developer attention to make it happen. Hopefully we can contribute to that. [1]: https://video.tuwien.ac.at/events/xdc/v/Ow9xtIyJeTt?t=01h13m49s [2]: https://github.com/Aetf/kmscon/ [3]: https://ukvly.org/ [4]: https://all-systems-go.io/ In between the talks at XDC (and during some of the talks about graphics drivers I had no hope of understanding), I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in a particularly productive state — it must have been the conference atmosphere. It didn't make sense to try to work on anything big, so I went through my backlog of small Spectrum improvements. Image rebuild times during development have gone down by a further non-trivial two seconds on a fast laptop, more code has been integrated into the single Meson build system I aspire to, and a few other smaller things. I also managed to completely clear my review queue, although it of course started filling up again immediately after. Demi's patch to automate the lists of files to include in images is finally finished and committed, and her udev changes made progress, but they've been blocked on further review from me, since with so much stuff on I haven't had a chance since leaving XDC. She's also made a bit of progress on system updates using systemd-sysupdate, about which we'll hopefully have more to say soon. Finally, we've been discussing for a couple of days now what to do about a recently introduced build failure on x86_64. I'm already late getting this update out, so I'm not going to go into detail, but basically it's very unclear what the right way to build BPF programs that include kernel UAPI headers is, or if there even is one. The common way of using a distro's linux-headers/libc package is not correct, and likely to lead to either loud compilation failures (as we're currently experiencing) or silent hidden bugs[5]. If we can't find a good solution, we can fall back to copying the definitions we need out of the headers, but I'm hoping it won't come to that. Investigation continues. This has also highlighted the need for pre-push testing on all supported architectures — the reason this build failure got past me is that it only happens on x86_64, and I was working on aarch64. I'll try to get that addressed. [5]: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/... Hopefully next week will be less busy, and I'll be able to get my head down a bit and do some programming.