This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W34

Alyssa Ross
2025-08-25T11:55:05Z

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This week, we've seen the first results from Yureka's work on Spectrum's
new networking stack posted to the mailing list[1]. The draft
submission modifies the networking VM to forward packets using XDP
between physical interfaces attached to the VM and a virtual interface
that will be provided by the host system. She has also been working on
getting the required dependencies into Nixpkgs: updating[2] libbpf to a
version that includes her recently accepted bugfix[3], and fixing
a musl build issue[4][5].

[1]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/20250823222134.1772413-1-yureka@cyberchaos.dev/
[2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/435918
[3]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/bpf/bpf-next.git/commit/?id=6c6b4146deb12d20f42490d5013f2043df942161
[4]: https://github.com/libbpf/libbpf/pull/919
[5]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/436237#discussion_r2296245797

Demi has been experimenting with using the systemd service manager on
the Spectrum host system. The main motivation was systemd's service
hardening capabilities. I think we will probably stick with s6 for now,
having discovered that we can likely get a similar level of hardening
with standalone sandboxing tools, and just creating users for VM
services at VM import time, but I wouldn't be surprised if we revisit
systemd again in future, and am open to the switch at some point in
future if it will be of benefit to Spectrum. I also understand that her
work has resulted in a number of service manager-independent
improvements to Spectrum that we should see posted soon.

As for me, it's been recovering from the second (final) round of dental
surgery, the usual Nixpkgs and server maintenance, and most of all
getting the new grant all finalized, which I'm hoping is now basically
done. I'm looking forward to actually getting back to proper work
soon. :)

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