Hack on isotest-ng - a rust port of isotovideo (os-autoinst aka testrunner of openQA) by szarate

Description

Some time ago, I managed to convince ByteOtter to hack something that resembles isotovideo but in Rust, not because I believe that Perl is dead, but more because there are certain limitations in the perl code (how it was written), and its always hard to add new functionalities when they are about implementing a new backend, or fixing bugs (Along with people complaining that Perl is dead, and that they don't like it)

In reality, I wanted to see if this could be done, and ByteOtter proved that it could be, while doing an amazing job at hacking a vnc console, and helping me understand better what RuPerl needs to work.

I plan to keep working on this for the next few years, and while I don't aim for feature completion or replacing isotovideo tih isotest-ng (name in progress), I do plan to be able to use it on a daily basis, using specialized tooling with interfaces, instead of reimplementing everything in the backend

Todo

• Add make targets for testability, e.g "spawn qemu and type"
• Add image search matching algorithm
• Add a Null test distribution provider
• Add a Perl Test Distribution Provider
• Fix unittests https://github.com/os-autoinst/isotest-ng/issues/5
• Research OpenTofu how to add new hypervisors/baremetal to OpenTofu
• Add an interface to openQA cli

Goals

• Implement at least one of the above, prepare proposals for GSoC
• Boot a system via it's BMC

Resources

See https://github.com/os-autoinst/isotest-ng

---

Grapesss: a physical Shamir's Secret Sharing application [ESP32-C3 + Mobile] by ecandino

Description

A couple of years ago I created StegoSecretS, a small cli used to encrypt and split a secret into multiple keys, using the Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm.

The idea is to re-implement the project using physical devices. One device alone will be useless, but when close together they can be used to decrypt the secret.

On a practical side the user encrypts the secret with a mobile application. The same application is used to split the secret, and load the partial keys into different micro-controllers. Another user will be able to decrypt the secret only having at least N devices close together (using the application).

I'm planning to use a couple of ESP32-C3 I bought, and build a very simple Android mobile application.

Goals

• Learn about Rust and micro-controllers (ESP32-C3)
• Learn about mobile applications (Android and Kotlin)

Resources

• Shamir's Secret Sharing
• The esp-rs Book
• Android - Kotlin

---

Implement a CLI tool for Trento - trentoctl by nkopliku

Description

Implement a trentoctl CLI for interacting with a trento installation

Goals

• learn rust
• implement an initial trentoctl tool to enhance trento automation
• have fun

Resources

trento rust. TUIs listed on this other hackweek project Hack on rich terminal user interfaces

---

Hacking on sched_ext by flonnegren

Description

Sched_ext upstream has some interesting issues open for grabs:

• core event counters
• topology: Use cpumasks

Goals

Send patches to sched_ext upstream

Also set up perfetto to trace some of the example schedulers.

Resources

https://github.com/sched-ext/scx

---

Write an url shortener in Rust (And learn in the way) by szarate

So I have 469.icu :), it's currently doing nothing... (and for sale) but in the meantime, I'd like to write an url shortener from scratch and deploy it on my own server

https://github.com/foursixnine/url-manager-rs/tree/main

---

early stage kdump support by mbrugger

Project Description

When we experience a early boot crash, we are not able to analyze the kernel dump, as user-space wasn't able to load the crash system. The idea is to make the crash system compiled into the host kernel (think of initramfs) so that we can create a kernel dump really early in the boot process.

Goal for the Hackweeks

1. Investigate if this is possible and the implications it would have (done in HW21)
2. Hack up a PoC (done in HW22 and HW23)
3. Prepare RFC series (giving it's only one week, we are entering wishful thinking territory here).

update HW23

• I was able to include the crash kernel into the kernel Image.
• I'll need to find a way to load that from init/main.c:start_kernel() probably after kcsan_init()
• I workaround for a smoke test was to hack kexec_file_load() systemcall which has two problems:
  1. My initramfs in the porduction kernel does not have a new enough kexec version, that's not a blocker but where the week ended
  2. As the crash kernel is part of init.data it will be already stale once I can call kexec_file_load() from user-space.

The solution is probably to rewrite the POC so that the invocation can be done from init.text (that's my theory) but I'm not sure if I can reuse the kexec infrastructure in the kernel from there, which I rely on heavily.

update HW24

• Day1
  • rebased on v6.12 with no problems others then me breaking the config
  • setting up a new compilation and qemu/virtme env
  • getting desperate as nothing works that used to work
• Day 2
  • getting to call the invocation of loading the early kernel from __init after kcsan_init()

• Day 3

  • fix problem of memdup not being able to alloc so much memory... use 64K page sizes for now
  • code refactoring
  • I'm now able to load the crash kernel
  • When using virtme I can boot into the crash kernel, also it doesn't boot completely (major milestone!), crash in elfcorehdr_read_notes()

• Day 4

  • crash systems crashes (no pun intended) in copy_old_mempage() link; will need to understand elfcorehdr...
  • call path vmcore_init() -> parse_crash_elf_headers() -> elfcorehdr_read() -> read_from_oldmem() -> copy_oldmem_page() -> copy_to_iter()

• Day 5

  • hacking arch/arm64/kernel/crash_dump.c:copy_old_mempage() to see if crash system really starts. It does.
  • fun fact: retested with more reserved memory and with UEFI FW, host kernel crashes in init but directly starts the crash kernel, so it works (somehow) \o/

• TODOs

  • fix elfcorehdr so that we actually can make use of all this...
  • test where in the boot __init() chain we can/should call kexec_early_dump()

---

FizzBuzz OS by mssola

Project Description

FizzBuzz OS (or just fbos) is an idea I've had in order to better grasp the fundamentals of the low level of a RISC-V machine. In practice, I'd like to build a small Operating System kernel that is able to launch three processes: one that simply prints "Fizz", another that prints "Buzz", and the third which prints "FizzBuzz". These processes are unaware of each other and it's up to the kernel to schedule them by using the timer interrupts as given on openSBI (fizz on % 3 seconds, buzz on % 5 seconds, and fizzbuzz on % 15 seconds).

This kernel provides just one system call, write, which allows any program to pass the string to be written into stdout.

This project is free software and you can find it here.

Goal for this Hackweek

• Better understand the RISC-V SBI interface.
• Better understand RISC-V in privileged mode.
• Have fun.

Resources

• SBI v2.0 ratified specification
• Blog post on SBI
• mssola/fbos

Results

The project was a resounding success Lots of learning, and the initial target was met.

---

RISC-V emulator in GLSL capable of running Linux by favogt

Description

There are already numerous ways to run Linux and some programs through emulation in a web browser (e.g. x86 and riscv64 on https://bellard.org/jslinux/), but none use WebGL/WebGPU to run the emulation on the GPU.

I already made a PoC of an AArch64 (64-bit Arm) emulator in OpenCL which is unfortunately hindered by a multitude of OpenCL compiler bugs on all platforms (Intel with beignet or the new compute runtime and AMD with Mesa Clover and rusticl). With more widespread and thus less broken GLSL vs. OpenCL and the less complex implementation requirements for RV32 (especially 32bit integers instead of 64bit), that should not be a major problem anymore.

Goals

Write an RISC-V system emulator in GLSL that is capable of booting Linux and run some userspace programs interactively. Ideally it is small enough to work on online test platforms like Shaderoo with a custom texture that contains bootstrap code, kernel and initrd.

Minimum:

riscv32 without FPU (RV32 IMA) and MMU (µClinux), running Linux in M-mode and userspace in U-mode.

Stretch goals:

FPU support, S-Mode support with MMU, SMP. Custom web frontend with more possibilities for I/O (disk image, network?).

Resources

RISC-V ISA Specifications
Shaderoo
OpenGL 4.5 Quick Reference Card

Result as of Hackweek 2024

WebGL turned out to be insufficient, it only supports OpenGL ES 3.0 but imageLoad/imageStore needs ES 3.1. So we switched directions and had to write a native C++ host for the shaders.

As of Hackweek Friday, the kernel attempts to boot and outputs messages, but panics due to missing memory regions.

Since then, some bugs were fixed and enough hardware emulation implemented, so that now Linux boots with framebuffer support and it's possible to log in and run programs!

The repo with a demo video is available at https://github.com/Vogtinator/risky-v

---

Modernize ocfs2 by goldwynr

Ocfs2 has gone into a stage of neglect and disrepair. Modernize the code to generate enough interest.

Goals: * Change the mount sequence to use fscontext * Move from using bufferhead to bio/folios * Use iomap * Run it through xfstests

---

Create DRM drivers for VESA and EFI framebuffers by tdz

Description

We already have simpledrm for firmware framebuffers. But the driver is originally for ARM boards, not PCs. It is already overloaded with code to support both use cases. At the same time it is missing possible features for VESA and EFI, such as palette modes or EDID support. We should have DRM drivers for VESA and EFI interfaces. The infrastructure exists already and initial drivers can be forked from simpledrm.

Goals

• Initially, a bare driver for VESA or EFI should be created. It can take functionality from simpledrm.
• Then we can begin to add additional features. The boot loader can provide EDID data. With VGA hardware, VESA can support paletted modes or color management. Example code exists in vesafb.

---