<qyliss>
Not very prompt -- I meant to do this 6 days ago!
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* edrex
waves to Cole Mickens , qyliss
<qyliss>
Hello!
<Irenes[m]>
yep! you're welcome :)
<Irenes[m]>
hi Cole
<colemickens>
Hello! Thanks! I've been trying to join the room for... oh gosh too long now.
<colemickens>
I mentioned SpectrumOS in #sway and got the low-down.
<colemickens>
Confused as to why the normal join method didn't work though.
<Irenes[m]>
it's a bug in the bridge
<Irenes[m]>
it is possible that the cause involved manual cleanup to room aliases that the bridge maintainers did at some point, but that's not fully understood
<qyliss>
Has anybody got in touch with the bridge operators about it?
<qyliss>
I've never used Matrix so I wouldn't know what to say.
<colemickens>
I've reported at least two rooms broken, once since last Nov and they remain broken, seems to be a known-ish long-standing (set of?) bug(s).
<qyliss>
:(
<colemickens>
Seems like it might be a tricky component.
<colemickens>
It makes me really sad actually, I can't evangelize Matrix (esp to certain folks who happen to also be in broken rooms) with the current bridging experience.
<colemickens>
I'm not sure it's a good use of my time to try to fix though, I don't know Matrix, or IRC, or the language it's written in.
<colemickens>
Anyway, Rust and Nix are more my style. :) Speaking of which...
<colemickens>
Going to ask random questions about Spectrum if it's cool
<colemickens>
https://spectrum-os.org/git/ random, but is it custom software or just the footer stripped of software info or?
<qyliss>
It's cgit with a non-default theme
<colemickens>
Any regular meetings even on IRC? Any f2f (zoom/jitsi?) or just irc+ml?
<qyliss>
There are no regular meetings or anything at the moment, largely because I'm the only person working on Spectrum at the moment.
<qyliss>
But if there was demand we could set something up.
<qyliss>
I suggested recently that streaming myself working on Spectrum might be a good way to get people acquainted with what's going on if they're interested in helping
<qyliss>
And a couple of people were interested, so I'll probably look into that.
<qyliss>
Once there's a bit less churn on crosvm I was going to write a ML post about some Rust tidy up somebody could help with if they were interested.
<colemickens>
qyliss: is there a roadmap for crosvm or just a general feeling that there's some features landing and then some quiet?
<colemickens>
or do you mean churn you're doing in the downstream fork/
<qyliss>
the latter
<qyliss>
To explain what I'm working on:
<qyliss>
Upstream crosvm doesn't really have any way for two VMs to communicate
<qyliss>
That's obviously quite important for Spectrum
<qyliss>
So for most of this year I've been working on adding that, essentially.
<colemickens>
I see.
<colemickens>
Would there be value in translating the design document into large chunks of efforts that will have to be made?
<qyliss>
Probably, but that sounds like a lot of work.
<qyliss>
And it might not be very clear at this point.
<qyliss>
For example, I didn't expect to have to implement this feature in crosvm nearly this early.
<qyliss>
But it became clear to me when I was talking to some potential contributors at 36c3 that almost everything they could work on actually depends on it.
<qyliss>
There's not even a milestone in my grant agreement for all this crosvm work -- it's not even funded beyond GitHub Sponsors
<qyliss>
But I realised that we need it.
<colemickens>
So, here's my thought: I wonder if TWI posts can be valuable for driving user+dev interest, even if it's just a post that re-introduces the general idea/motivations for the project, with the blurbs you just gave me.
<colemickens>
And then the next few things that might be unblocked.
<colemickens>
I didn't take a super close look (esp at branches and other repos) so I didnt know there was such active dev or that you're about to unblock potential parallel work.
<colemickens>
I guess 36c3 people did? Did you give a talk?
<qyliss>
No, I was just introduced to a couple of interested people
<qyliss>
Thank you for all these ideas, btw. It's nice to see someone take such an active interest.
<qyliss>
So, my concern with a TWI post is that not much happens week-to-week, from an outsider's perspective.
<colemickens>
Just a thought, and I don't say it without thinking of the fact that writing such an update is not necessarily trivial to just throw out.
<qyliss>
Like, every week this year it would have been "worked a bit more on crosvm, still doesn't work", up until last week
<qyliss>
In which case it would have changed to "worked a bit more on crosvm, now it works kind-of"
* colemickens
nods
<qyliss>
I've so far avoided giving talks or anything because I'm wary of promising things to to many people that I end up not delivering on.
<colemickens>
Well, maybe that idea wasn't the best one for now. The streaming one hits it a bit though, if you had a feed of them on spectrum-os.org. idk, I feel like maybe I'm projecting though, I don't really know how people evaluate whether to look past the first page, or dig into projects in early stages. The design doc certainly entices.
<qyliss>
I do write on my blog when interesting stuff happens
<qyliss>
(I'm sort of supposed to do one every couple of months)
<colemickens>
The most recent most is certainly interesting to me.
<qyliss>
I just noticed that it comes up first or second in a bunch of search engines if you search for "virtio wayland", which is nice
<qyliss>
Because prior to that post there was basically no information on it out there.
<qyliss>
I've also been thinking I should add a list of links to the homepage
<qyliss>
It's kind of difficult to navigate with them mixed up in the text
<qyliss>
And I could link to my blog on there.
<qyliss>
colemickens: anyway, thanks very much for the suggestions. maybe talk more about this tomorrow, but now I must sleep.
<qyliss>
I appreciate your interest.
<IdleBot_e923fa8a>
Hm, I did not think about VM-to-VM virtio-wl as a prerequisite for some contributions; would any of them be unblocked by re-packaging my nsjail setup to get rid of the Lisp part, to provide Nix-installable CrosVM+netns+9p+VNC experience as an early prototype?
<IdleBot_e923fa8a>
9p being rust-9p here; I guess rust-vnc could be packaged too without much trouble
<IdleBot_e923fa8a>
OK, rust-vnc last auth/crypto, but the communication will be entirely inside sockets and net NS-es, so should not be too bad
* colemickens
has sunk many hours into building sommelier. including since this post was written :(
<colemickens>
oh hey, maybe that's useful though, I have some code the xdg-stable v1 update. I'll look and see if you've done that yet.
<qyliss>
IdleBot_e923fa8a: this isn't just about virtio_wl
<qyliss>
This is inter-VM communication in general.
<qyliss>
If I can do one virtio device I can do them all, pretty much.
<qyliss>
colemickens: I have. What I could really use now is wl_compositor v4.
<qyliss>
If you do have a go at hacking on Sommelier, start-vm.nix on the crosvm-demo branch gives you a really easy way to test.
<colemickens>
okay!
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<IdleBot_e923fa8a>
qyliss: well, isolated networking is an option for VM-to-VM communication…
<hyperfekt>
reading about xdg-desktop-portal is very promising. i feel like it's filling the niche that would've needed the most effort to implement and would be most crucial for adoption
<Shell>
hyperfekt: it’s honestly one of the most exciting things in desktop Linux to me right now.
<qyliss>
IdleBot_e923fa8a: for _some_ VM communication yes, but if we did that, the code we were able to write would end up having to be rewritten later
<qyliss>
So might as well get it right the first time
<IdleBot_e923fa8a>
Well, maybe I indeed underestimate the dependence on «which kind of socket» in the parts of SpectrumOS that I do not expect to use; thanks for helping me measure my systematic bias a bit better
<qyliss>
Which kind of socket isn't really relevant, of course.
<qyliss>
But I can't just shovel virtio drivers over a network.
<qyliss>
Andlots of things are implemented in existing virtio drivers.
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