This Week in Spectrum, 2025-W30

Alyssa Ross
2025-07-28T12:00:46Z

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This week, Demi and I continued the review of the patches adding
PipeWire to guests, now on their seventh revision[1], with some
preparatory patches having already been applied[2][3]. She also opened
a couple of Cloud Hypervisor PRs[4][5], one of which adds support for a
generic vhost-user device. This would be a very exciting feature for
Cloud Hypervisor to gain, because it would mean using new kinds of
vhost-user device with Cloud Hypervisor wouldn't require any Cloud
Hypervisor modifications. I believe (but we haven't confirmed yet) that
this should allow using a vhost-user-sound device with Cloud Hypervisor
straight away, and eventually allow us to drop our patches for GPU
support altogether, although that also requires some extra vhost-user
messages to be standardised (an effort which is still ongoing[6]).

[1]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/263f81f2-9e86-4bb1-be80-41f7731a9a63@gmail.com/
[2]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=b3cb2511d3612a1d58246fabdc6c4fbb21886c4c
[3]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=560fd878ba1bbd8df0fe28488e72948f28940948
[4]: https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor/pull/7221
[5]: https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor/pull/7223
[6]: https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/20250609144729.884027-1-aesteve@redhat.com/

As for me, aside from reviewing and applying some of Demi's fixes, I
updated Spectrum's pinned Nixpkgs[7] and released a new version of the
Cloud Hypervisor patches[8], and did the usual round of server updates.
Sometimes, updating the pinned Nixpkgs is easy, otherwise, due to a
change that looked entirely inconsequential upstream, it can take a lot
of work, and this has been one of the latter variety, so I'm glad it's
finally done. Since then, and having just returned home from a couple
of months of travelling, I've been feeling very tired. A few weeks
ago[8], I mentioned that I'd been thinking I might have to calm things
down a bit for myself to make sure I'm on the right side of burnout, and
I think now is probably the time for that, so I'd expect there won't be
much direct progress from me for the next week or two, although I should
still be keeping up with emails — feeling like I'd come back to a
mountain of them would be much worse than just dealing with them roughly
as they come in — and doing what I can to make sure nobody else is
blocked.

[7]: https://spectrum-os.org/git/spectrum/commit/?id=d0a5f0abdc356f1bba676d489ba9378554fcd134
[8]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-discuss/87o6twmg2p.fsf@alyssa.is/

See you soon!