This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W24

[Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>]

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This week, I worked on a patch series[1] that fixes using a USB serial
console on the host.  This should be helpful for debugging the
modesetting issue Yureka was seeing last week[2].  I also wrote a
regression test for the issue, which ended up being the bulk of the work
because this is only the second automated test we have that runs a full
Spectrum system, so I had to factor some shared helpers for doing those
out of the existing ad-hoc single test.  Aside from that, I attended
DevConf.CZ.  The more management-focused talks were particularly
helpful, as I'm having to pick bits of that up on the fly as Spectrum
grows to have more people working on it.

[1]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/20250613140508.76998-1-hi@alyssa.is/
[2]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-discuss/da08325e-f840-43c4-be01-df01ef9ff957@yuka.dev/

Yureka is working on improving networking in Spectrum.  Currently,
networking runs through the host kernel, but the idea is to get it out
of there and into userspace, and in future ideally its own VM (perhaps
even a microkernel).  This week, she started working on getting packets
out of the physical network interface using XDP.

Demi worked on cleaning up unsound Rust APIs in Cloud Hypervisor, and
investigated what a kernel implementation of her proposed virtio-iommu
interrupt remapping specification[4] would look like.  It turns out to be
quite complicated[5], so now we're considering alternative approaches to
solving the problem.

[3]: https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor/pull/7129
[4]: https://lore.kernel.org/virtio-comment/ebeef135-1b87-4834-ad8d-5bb76554baa2@gmail.com/
[5]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/c40da5dc-44c0-454e-8b1d-d3f42c299592@gmail.com/

Next week, I'll be attending OW2'con[6] and the NGI Forum[7].  Get in
touch if we should talk at either of those!  I'm @qyliss:fairydust.space
on Matrix.

[6]: https://www.ow2con.org/view/2025/
[7]: https://ngi.eu/ngi-forum25/

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