This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W31

[Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>]

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First, some big news: Spectrum's application for funding from the NGI
Zero Commons programme has been accepted.  The final amount granted is
still undetermined, but I expect that Demi's, Yureka's and my work on
new feature development Spectrum will be funded for at least the next
year.  (Maintenance and administrative work is generally not covered —
that's where GitHub Sponsors / Liberapay donations come in for me.)
This is the first time we'll have funding that covers more than just me,
so it should mean that we'll be able to really accelerate our pace of
development, as we've already started to see with Demi and Yureka's work
over the past couple of months, for which I'm grateful to them for
having been willing to make a head start before we had this confirmed.
There's still more work to do, agreeing the exact amount of funding, and
what work will be covered, so expect a lot of our time (especially mine)
to be occupied with that in the near future.

Next, Demi's work on PipeWire support in guests is now in the repo[1].
This doesn't mean that we have audio support in Spectrum quite yet,
because there's also some host-side work to do to expose a virtio-sound
device.  In that direction, I added vhost-device-sound to Nixpkgs[2],
and I started working on adding socket activation support to it.

[1]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=6c945fc8b81ab15866567816007dee3e5793cf4d
[2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/429376

Yureka is now able to send and receive ethernet frames to a Wi-Fi
interface in a VM.  This is an important step towards our goal of moving
routing to host userspace, connecting VMs running applications with VMs
running network drivers.

I also spent some time on Nixpkgs maintenance.  A test build of Spectrum
against staging identified some build regressions, so I've been working
through those[3][4][5].  I also tested a crosvm update, and release
candidates of QEMU and Meson, which proved worthwhile because I found a
regression in Meson affecting Spectrum's tests[6].

[3]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/429588
[4]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/429585
[5]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/429816
[6]: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/14869

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