Reassess HiFive Premier P550 board (for RISC-V virtualization) by a_faerber

Description

With growing interest in the RISC-V instruction set architecture, we need to re-evaluate ways of building packages for it:

Currently openSUSE OBS is using x86_64 build workers, using QEMU userspace-level (syscall) emulation inside KVM VMs. Occasionally this setup causes build failures, due to timing differences or incomplete emulation. Andreas Schwab and others have collected workarounds in projects like openSUSE:Factory:RISCV to deal with some of those issues.

Ideally we would be using native riscv64 KVM VMs instead. This requires CPUs with the H extension. Two generally available development boards feature the ESWIN 7700X System-on-Chip with SiFive P550 CPUs, HiFive Premier P550 and Milk-V Megrez. We've had access to the HiFive Premier P550 for some time now, but the early version (based on Yocto) had issues with the bootloader, and reportedly later boards were booting to a dracut emergency shell for lack of block device drivers.

Goals

• Update the boot firmware
• Test whether and how far openSUSE Tumbleweed boots

Results

• Boot firmware image 2025.11.00 successfully flashed onto board
  • Enables UEFI boot in U-Boot by default
  • U-Boot's embedded Flat Device Tree is lacking a timebase-frequency, required for recent (6.16.3) mainline kernels (panic leading to reset, visible via earlycon=sbi)
• Tested eswin/eic7700-hifive-premier-p550.dtb from Ubuntu 2025.11.00 image
  • Allows to boot past the above panic, but times out in JeOS image while waiting for block device, dropping to dracut emergency shell
  • No devices shown in lsblk -- 6.16 appears to be lacking device drivers still

Resources

• SiFive HiFive Premier P550 board
• Milk-V Megrez board

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Q2Boot - A handy QEMU VM launcher by amanzini

Description

Q2Boot (Qemu Quick Boot) is a command-line tool that wraps QEMU to provide a streamlined experience for launching virtual machines. It automatically configures common settings like KVM acceleration, virtio drivers, and networking while allowing customization through both configuration files and command-line options.

The project originally was a personal utility in D, now recently rewritten in idiomatic Go. It lives at repository https://github.com/ilmanzo/q2boot

Goals

Improve the project, testing with different scenarios , address issues and propose new features. It will benefit of some basic integration testing by providing small sample disk images.

Updates

• Dec 1, 2025 : refactor command line options, added structured logging. Released v0.0.2
• Dec 2, 2025 : added external monitor via telnet option
• Dec 4, 2025 : released v0.0.3 with architecture auto-detection
• Dec 5, 2025 : filing new issues and general polishment. Designing E2E testing

Resources

• https://github.com/ilmanzo/q2boot
• https://www.qemu.org/

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Contribute to terraform-provider-libvirt by pinvernizzi

Description

The SUSE Manager (SUMA) teams' main tool for infrastructure automation, Sumaform, largely relies on terraform-provider-libvirt. That provider is also widely used by other teams, both inside and outside SUSE.

It would be good to help the maintainers of this project and give back to the community around it, after all the amazing work that has been already done.

If you're interested in any of infrastructure automation, Terraform, virtualization, tooling development, Go (...) it is also a good chance to learn a bit about them all by putting your hands on an interesting, real-use-case and complex project.

Goals

• Get more familiar with Terraform provider development and libvirt bindings in Go
• Solve some issues and/or implement some features
• Get in touch with the community around the project

Resources

• CONTRIBUTING readme
• Go libvirt library in use by the project
• Terraform plugin development
• "Good first issue" list

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Extracting, converting and importing VMs from Nutanix into SUSE Virtualization by emendonca

Description

The idea is to delve into understanding Nutanix AHV internals on how it stores and runs VMs, and how to extract them in an automated way for importing into a KVM-compatible hypervisor, like SUSE Virtualization/Harvester. The final product will be not only be documentation, but a working prototype that can be used to automate the process.

Goals

1) document how to create a simple lab with NutaniX AHV community edition 2) determine the basic elements we need to interact with 3) determine what are the best paths to grab the images through, balancing speed and complexity 4) document possible issues and create a roadmap for tackling them 4) should we adapt an existing solution or implement a new one? 5) implement the solution!

Resources

Similar project I created: https://github.com/doccaz/vm-import-ui Nutanix AHV forums Nutanix technical bulletins

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SUSE KVM Best Practices - Focus on SAP Workloads and Use Cases by roseswe

Description

SUSE Best Practices around KVM, especially for SAP workloads. Early Google presentation already made from various customer projects and SUSE sources.

Goals

• Complete presentation we can reuse in SUSE Consulting projects
• 2025: Bring it to version 1.00 ready for customers

Resources

KVM (virt-manager) images

SUSE/SAP/KVM Best Practices

• https://documentation.suse.com/en-us/sles/15-SP6/single-html/SLES-virtualization/
• SAP Note 1522993 - "Linux: SAP on SUSE KVM - Kernel-based Virtual Machine" && 2284516 - SAP HANA virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise hypervisors https://me.sap.com/notes/2284516
• SUSECon24: [TUTORIAL-1253] Virtualizing SAP workloads with SUSE KVM || https://youtu.be/PTkpRVpX2PM
• SUSE Best Practices for SAP HANA on KVM - https://documentation.suse.com/sbp/sap-15/html/SBP-SLES4SAP-HANAonKVM-SLES15SP4/index.html

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Add a machine-readable output to dmidecode by jdelvare

Description

There have been repeated requests for a machine-friendly dmidecode output over the last decade. During Hack Week 19, 5 years ago, I prepared the code to support alternative output formats, but didn't have the time to go further. Last year, Jiri Hnidek from Red Hat Linux posted a proof-of-concept implementation to add JSON output support. This is a fairly large pull request which needs to be carefully reviewed and tested.

Goals

Review Jiri's work and provide constructive feedback. Merge the code if acceptable. Evaluate the costs and benefits of using a library such as json-c.

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Improve the picotm Transaction Manager by tdz

Picotm is a system-level transaction manager. It provides transactional semantics to low-level C operations, such as

• memory access,
• modifying data structures,
• (some) file I/O, and
• common interfaces from the C Standard Library and POSIX.

Picotm also handles error detection and recovery for all it's functionality. It's fully modular, so new functionality can be added.

For the Hackweek, I want to dedicate some time to picotm. I want to finish some of the refactoring work that I have been working on. If there's time left, I'd like to investigate two-phase commits and how to support them in picotm.

Picotm is available at http://picotm.org/.

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Smart lighting with Pico 2 by jmodak

Description

I am trying to create a smart-lighting project with a Raspberry Pi Pico that reacts to a movie's visuals and audio that involves combining two distinct functions: ambient screen lighting(visual response) and sound-reactive lighting(audio response)

Goals

• Visuals: Capturing the screen's colour requires an external device to analyse screen content and send colour data to the MCU via serial communication.
• Audio: A sound sensor module connected directly to the Pico that can detect sound volume.
• Pico 2W: The MCU receives data fro, both inputs and controls an LED strip.

Resources

• Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W
• RGB LED strip
• Sound detecting sensor
• Power supply
• breadboard and wires

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x64id: An x86/x64 instruction disassembler by m.crivellari

Description

This is an old side project. An x86/x64 machine code decoder. It is useful to get instructions' length and identify each of its fields.

Example:

C7 85 68 FF FF FF 00 00 00 00

This is the instruction:

MOV DWORD PTR SS:[LOCAL.38],0

What follows are some of the information collected by the disassembler, based on the specific instruction:

RAW bytes (hex): C7 85 68 FF FF FF 00 00 00 00
Instr. length: 10
Print instruction fields:
        Located Prefixes 0:

        OP: 0xC7
        mod_reg_rm: 0x85
        disp (4): 0xFFFFFF68
        Iimm: 0x0

Lacks the mnemonic representation: from the previous machine code is not able to produce the "MOV..." instruction, for example.

Goals

The goal is almost easy: partially implement the mnemonic representation. I have already started during the weekend, likely tomorrow I will push the branch!

Resources

• The project: https://github.com/DispatchCode/x64-Instruction-Decoder/
• This is useful to avoid gdb and objdump in local: https://defuse.ca/online-x86-assembler.htm
• Another interesting resource is https://godbolt.org/

Progress

• An initial implementation can be found at: https://github.com/DispatchCode/x64-Instruction-Decoder/tree/mnemonic-support It is described under the "Mnemonic translation" in the README file!

Let's consider this example:

[...other bytes...] 43 89 44 B5 00 01 00 [...other bytes...]

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pudc - A PID 1 process that barks to the internet by mssola

Description

As a fun exercise in order to dig deeper into the Linux kernel, its interfaces, the RISC-V architecture, and all the dragons in between; I'm building a blog site cooked like this:

• The backend is written in a mixture of C and RISC-V assembly.
• The backend is actually PID1 (for real, not within a container).
• We poll and parse incoming HTTP requests ourselves.
• The frontend is a mere HTML page with htmx.

The project is meant to be Linux-specific, so I'm going to use io_uring, pidfs, namespaces, and Linux-specific features in order to drive all of this.

I'm open for suggestions and so on, but this is meant to be a solo project, as this is more of a learning exercise for me than anything else.

Goals

• Have a better understanding of different Linux features from user space down to the kernel internals.
• Most importantly: have fun.

Resources

• https://github.com/mssola/pudc

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