This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W22

[Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1251 bytes --]

This week I was once again mostly preoccupied with arranging continuing
funding.  If approved, this will be the biggest funding allocation
Spectrum has ever had, but with that comes a corresponding increase in
the work required to make it happen.  I also spent some time fixing
Nixpkgs build issues that would affect Spectrum in future.

That doesn't mean there hasn't been any exciting Spectrum work this
week, though.  Demi, whose name you may recognize from her extensive
past work on Qubes OS, submitted a patch to the VIRTIO specification to
add interrupt remapping capabilities to virtio-iommu on x86_64.  This is
an important requirement for being able to move implementations of
virtual devices into their own VMs, which will in turn enable running
hardware drivers in VMs rather than on the host, and it has been a
longstanding wish list item in Spectrum's upcoming projects list[1].
It's very exciting to have somebody as knowledgeable as Demi working
towards Spectrum's goals.

[1]: https://pad.lassul.us/s/mDfFPvHjA#Cloud-Hypervisor-support-interrupt-remapping-inside-x86_64-guests

BTW: From next week onwards, I think I'll start sending these updates
only to discuss@, not devel@, because I don't think it makes sense to
duplicate them.

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 227 bytes --]