Spectrum Status Update, March 2022

[Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>]

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Hi all, I thought I'd try a different format of update.  It's
difficult to find the time for the big This Week in Spectrum updates
I've tried to do before, but I'd like to provide some sort of account
of what I've been doing.

So, here's an overview of what I did in March.  I'm happy to expand on
any of it that sounds interesting — just hit Reply All and tell me
what you'd like to hear more about!

I'm also interested to hear what you think of this status update
format.  I'd like to get better about communicating what I'm working
on, in a sustainable way.  Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Miscellaneous
-------------

 • Edited and published demo video[1]
 • Set up an IRC bot to post incoming mailing list messages
 • Switched from Busybox's modprobe to kmod
 • Removed unused dependencies
 • Various other cleanups and fixes
 • Started work towards CI for Spectrum
 • Prototyped a shared base image for application VMs

[1]: https://diode.zone/w/dWAWHR38Zu3feRtDKjVEJb

virtiofs investigation
----------------------

 • Prototyped virtiofs VM filesystem access
 • Reported a bug: "Can't run unprivileged any more due to setgroups"[2]
 • Participated in discussion and testing of Musl port[3][4][5]

[2]: https://gitlab.com/virtio-fs/virtiofsd/-/issues/36
[3]: https://github.com/slp/capng/pull/2#issuecomment-1059976861
[4]: https://github.com/slp/capng/pull/3
[5]: https://github.com/rust-lang/libc/pull/2713

Spectrum-related upstream Nixpkgs commits
-----------------------------------------

 • lvm2: don't use targetPlatform (05a6c124e65)
 • coreutils: add debug output (e30f0f31e8d)
 • pkgsMusl.systemd: fix build for 250.4 (39eee39fd92)
 • nghttp2: only run tests on GNU (8685cea963b)
 • python3.pkgs.importlib-metadata: fix cross (3c7b77e638b)
 • spidermonkey: use the same LLVM as rustc (3ff5f0eb764)
 • pkgsStatic.stdenv.cc.cc: put static libs in $lib (12c37aec377)
 • Revert "gcc: Always pass `--enable-shared` by default" (c6dd11ca39a)
 • libudev-zero: 1.0.0 -> 1.0.1 (c7b7ad77985)
 • linux_latest: 5.16.14 -> 5.17 (58ae11758e8)
 • crosvm: 81.12871.0.0-rc1 -> 99.14468.0.0-rc1 (6aefdafbed9)
 • shadow: 4.8.1 -> 4.8.11 (8d35d7e2bf1)
 • pkgsMusl.libnetfilter_conntrack: fix build (2cc5ec86571)
 • pkgsMusl.systemdMinimal: fix build (b8734c50e29)
 • linux.configfile: fix alts containing "/m" (fb079c3110d)
 • cloud-hypervisor: 21.0 -> 22.0 (36a211e1ee3)
 • edk2: 202108 -> 202202 (9222b68380e)
 • kmod: add dev and lib outputs (dc1303185f8)
 • systemd: update patchShebangs comment (a0bfc8e7c1f)
 • systemd: fix a whole bunch of typos (479b1cb510b)

Pending Spectrum related Nixpkgs PRs
------------------------------------

 • crosvm: add support for virgl_renderer{,_next} (#165128)
 • qemu: 6.2.0 -> 7.0.0 (#165291)

Spectrum infra related upstream Nixpkgs commits
-----------------------------------------------

 • irccat: init at 0.4.8 (ce8cbe3c01f)
 • git: enable debug info (4345b27dedf)
 • cgit-pink: init at 1.3.0 (deab83e1167)
 • mailman-web: fix django version check removal (3512f5b7075)

Demo video related upstream Nixpkgs commits
-------------------------------------------

 • ccsymbols: init at 2020-04-19 (cf7556eea5a)

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