This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W38

Alyssa Ross
2025-09-23T14:38:29Z

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Whoops — I'm a bit late again this week. Was really busy yesterday.
Given how late I was last week though, there's not all that much anyway.

As usual, we acquired some build fixes and development environments from
Demi. Some small ones were applied — my favourite is making sure that
early kernel logs don't get lost in the development environment[1] — and
bigger things like automatically generating file lists for images[2], and
build performance improvements[3] are still under discussion. We also
continued discussing the udev switch, and I expect to see a new version
of that posted soon.

[1]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=1c471fc4191958dfbffbdb5ad2de404e19b31287
[2]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/20250903-genfiles-v1-0-cc993fcb1e4c@gmail.com
[3]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/20250919-less-dirname-v1-0-5df7ca617b9b@gmail.com
[4]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/20250913-udev-v1-0-eade4ab8f2b4@gmail.com

I spent some time debugging a Rutabaga crash in QEMU. When I submitted
a fix, I learned that it had already been fixed a few days prior[5], but
I also discovered that Rutabaga has been extracted from crosvm to a
standalone project, which I think is fantastic news. They're even
adding a proper Meson build (no wrapped Cargo)[6]. Excited to review that.

[5]: https://github.com/magma-gpu/rutabaga_gfx/pull/9
[6]: https://github.com/magma-gpu/rutabaga_gfx/pull/13

Just as I've been writing this, Yureka has submitted a new version of
the XDP forwarding series[7]. We're aiming to have the XDP forwarder
program committed soon, but actually using it will have to wait for the
rest of the new network stack, and for a couple of Nixpkgs fixes[8][9],
which we also made some progress on this week.

[7]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/20250923132012.28013-1-yureka@cyberchaos.dev
[8]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/444996
[9]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/436206

I've been working on a couple of talks I'll be giving soon. The first
is "Rethinking the compartmentalization experience" at the Qubes OS
Summit in Berlin on Friday at 12:30 UTC[10], and the other is "An
upstream-first approach to application virtualization" at XDC in Vienna
on Tuesday at 08:30 UTC. These are actually the first talks I'll ever
have given about Spectrum, because I've historically wanted to avoid
publicity until I was confident Spectrum would be able to deliver on its
promises. As we're approaching an initial release, this is becoming
less of a concern, and by now we've learned a lot that's going to be
useful to share regardless. As always, get in touch if you want to chat
at either of these events.

[10]: https://cfp.3mdeb.com/qubes-os-summit-2025/talk/UPMP38/
[11]: https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/10/contributions/436/

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