This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W20

[Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>]

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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=df2824a8e19c16a27adb951f664a5396c300fc9f
[2]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/tree/release/checks/networking?id=879b4cb94f998a5e96a383ec325bebcc6fd50502
[3]: https://anubis.techaro.lol/
[4]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=e06b57f4fefc834f4868540a53de580b2f66dd4c
[5]: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/8c5b359579b0f1029edafb0bd96b5ebfb271db76
[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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