Once again, the SUSE band is coming together to make music and we're planning a party this time round!!! We have a band name :-)

The idea is about an easy way to allow users to make upgrades (e.g.: changing from one major version like 15.0 to version 15.1) using a GUI and as easy as they can in Ubuntu. Something like a notification with a button to perform the upgrade with just one-click, instead of having to deal with the terminal, that frights some new users and gives them the sensation of an outdated system.

Goal: I will look during this project for existing tools and test suites Upstream, used by others distros (like 1) Fedora, 2) Arch-Linux, 3) Debian), and try to learn how they test, use their tool, projects.

New Development In previous hack weeks, the first few days ended up being wasted on just getting it working. I'm pleased to share that the code quality has improved dramatically since the last hack week and there are now extensive test cases for both unit testing and testing against real vmcores, and we'll use both mypy and pylint (if installed) to perform static analysis. Packages for those are available in openSUSE or as part of the crash-python OBS repo for SLE15. It has been tested with kernels from 3.0 to 5.1.

Currently, the usual way to communicate with VM instances in the cloud from outside is ssh. This is okay for most uses, but a) does not work when you mess up with the guest's ability to network and b) requires a free floating IP. I wonder if, for qemu/kvm instances, it would be possible to use virtio-serial possibilities : from the guest, it is seen as a serial port, and from the outside, it is seen as a UNIX socket, or as something else. It is fast, as it does not go through virtualization and device drivers.

There is a running gag built into openQA called interactive mode. It goes like this: "if you need the interactive mode, it's broken". The reason: the so called interactive mode is a collection of hacks - in theory making it possible to update needles in a running test. But in fact it's a UI desaster that almost never works. So the goal of this hackweek project is to get rid of it - and instead build a real control from the webui into the backend allowing tests to be written on the fly including needle creation/updates. Easy as that.

This is the tool I've been working on since HW11 and it needs more work. Actually, there's always something which could be done on it. It is basically an x86 instruction decoder with special emphasis on the kernel and decoding interesting pieces of it in order to help in the development of low-level patching techniques, among others. git repo: https://gitlab.suse.de/bp/x86d

Make a final attempt to implement a graphical user interface for grub2 (gfxboot2).

It's quite some work, unfortunately. Here's what's done so far:

To make OpenQA work with real ARM devices, we need to control * Reset