Improve Development Environment on Uyuni by mbussolotto

Description

Currently create a dev environment on Uyuni might be complicated. The steps are:

• add the correct repo
• download packages
• configure your IDE (checkstyle, format rules, sonarlint....)
• setup debug environment
• ...

The current doc can be improved: some information are hard to be find out, some others are completely missing.

Dev Container might solve this situation.

Goals

Uyuni development in no time:

• using VSCode:
  • setting.json should contains all settings (for all languages in Uyuni, with all checkstyle rules etc...)
  • dev container should contains all dependencies
  • setup debug environment
• implement a GitHub Workspace solution
• re-write documentation

Lots of pieces are already implemented: we need to connect them in a consistent solution.

Resources

• https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni/wiki

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ClusterOps - Easily install and manage your personal kubernetes cluster by andreabenini

Description

ClusterOps is a Kubernetes installer and operator designed to streamline the initial configuration and ongoing maintenance of kubernetes clusters. The focus of this project is primarily on personal or local installations. However, the goal is to expand its use to encompass all installations of Kubernetes for local development purposes.
It simplifies cluster management by automating tasks and providing just one user-friendly YAML-based configuration config.yml.

Overview

• Simplified Configuration: Define your desired cluster state in a simple YAML file, and ClusterOps will handle the rest.
• Automated Setup: Automates initial cluster configuration, including network settings, storage provisioning, special requirements (for example GPUs) and essential components installation.
• Ongoing Maintenance: Performs routine maintenance tasks such as upgrades, security updates, and resource monitoring.
• Extensibility: Easily extend functionality with custom plugins and configurations.
• Self-Healing: Detects and recovers from common cluster issues, ensuring stability, idempotence and reliability. Same operation can be performed multiple times without changing the result.
• Discreet: It works only on what it knows, if you are manually configuring parts of your kubernetes and this configuration does not interfere with it you can happily continue to work on several parts and use this tool only for what is needed.

Features

• distribution and engine independence. Install your favorite kubernetes engine with your package manager, execute one script and you'll have a complete working environment at your disposal.
  
• Basic config approach. One single config.yml file with configuration requirements (add/remove features): human readable, plain and simple. All fancy configs managed automatically (ingress, balancers, services, proxy, ...).
• Local Builtin ContainerHub. The default installation provides a fully configured ContainerHub available locally along with the kubernetes installation. This configuration allows the user to build, upload and deploy custom container images as they were provided from external sources. Internet public sources are still available but local development can be kept in this localhost server. Builtin ClusterOps operator will be fetched from this ContainerHub registry too.
• Kubernetes official dashboard installed as a plugin, others planned too (k9s for example).
• Kubevirt plugin installed and properly configured. Unleash the power of classic virtualization (KVM+QEMU) on top of Kubernetes and manage your entire system from there, libvirtd and virsh libs are required.
• One operator to rule them all. The installation script configures your machine automatically during installation and adds one kubernetes operator to manage your local cluster. From there the operator takes care of the cluster on your behalf.
• Clean installation and removal. Just test it, when you are done just use the same program to uninstall everything without leaving configs (or pods) behind.

Planned features (Wishlist / TODOs)

• Containerized Data Importer (CDI). Persistent storage management add-on for Kubernetes to provide a declarative way of building and importing Virtual Machine Disks on PVCs for

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SUSE AI Meets the Game Board by moio

Use tabletopgames.ai’s open source TAG and PyTAG frameworks to apply Statistical Forward Planning and Deep Reinforcement Learning to two board games of our own design. On an all-green, all-open source, all-AWS stack!

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Results: Infrastructure Achievements

We successfully built and automated a containerized stack to support our AI experiments. This included:

• a Fully-Automated, One-Command, GPU-accelerated Kubernetes setup: we created an OpenTofu based script, tofu-tag, to deploy SUSE's RKE2 Kubernetes running on CUDA-enabled nodes in AWS, powered by openSUSE with GPU drivers and gpu-operator
• Containerization of the TAG and PyTAG frameworks: TAG (Tabletop AI Games) and PyTAG were patched for seamless deployment in containerized environments. We automated the container image creation process with GitHub Actions. Our forks (PRs upstream upcoming):
  • https://github.com/moio/TabletopGames/tree/hackweek24
  • https://github.com/moio/PyTAG/tree/hackweek24

./deploy.sh and voilà - Kubernetes running PyTAG (k9s, above) with GPU acceleration (nvtop, below)

Results: Game Design Insights

Our project focused on modeling and analyzing two card games of our own design within the TAG framework:

• Game Modeling: We implemented models for Dario's "Bamboo" and Silvio's "Totoro" and "R3" games, enabling AI agents to play thousands of games ...in minutes!
• AI-driven optimization: By analyzing statistical data on moves, strategies, and outcomes, we iteratively tweaked the game mechanics and rules to achieve better balance and player engagement.
• Advanced analytics: Leveraging AI agents with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and random action selection, we compared performance metrics to identify optimal strategies and uncover opportunities for game refinement .
  • more about Bamboo on Dario's site
  • more about R3 on Silvio's site (italian, translation coming)
  • more about Totoro on Silvio's site

A family picture of our card games in progress. From the top: Bamboo, Totoro, R3

Results: Learning, Collaboration, and Innovation

Beyond technical accomplishments, the project showcased innovative approaches to coding, learning, and teamwork:

• "Trio programming" with AI assistance: Our "trio programming" approach—two developers and GitHub Copilot—was a standout success, especially in handling slightly-repetitive but not-quite-exactly-copypaste tasks. Java as a language tends to be verbose and we found it to be fitting particularly well.
• AI tools for reporting and documentation: We extensively used AI chatbots to streamline writing and reporting. (Including writing this report! ...but this note was added manually during edit!)
• GPU compute expertise: Overcoming challenges with CUDA drivers and cloud infrastructure deepened our understanding of GPU-accelerated workloads in the open-source ecosystem.
• Game design as a learning platform: By blending AI techniques with creative game design, we learned not only about AI strategies but also about making games fun, engaging, and balanced.

Last but not least we had a lot of fun! ...and this was definitely not a chatbot generated line!

The Context: AI + Board Games

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Technical talks at universities by agamez

Description

This project aims to empower the next generation of tech professionals by offering hands-on workshops on containerization and Kubernetes, with a strong focus on open-source technologies. By providing practical experience with these cutting-edge tools and fostering a deep understanding of open-source principles, we aim to bridge the gap between academia and industry.

For now, the scope is limited to Spanish universities, since we already have the contacts and have started some conversations.

Goals

• Technical Skill Development: equip students with the fundamental knowledge and skills to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications using open-source tools like Kubernetes.
• Open-Source Mindset: foster a passion for open-source software, encouraging students to contribute to open-source projects and collaborate with the global developer community.
• Career Readiness: prepare students for industry-relevant roles by exposing them to real-world use cases, best practices, and open-source in companies.

Resources

• Instructors: experienced open-source professionals with deep knowledge of containerization and Kubernetes.
• SUSE Expertise: leverage SUSE's expertise in open-source technologies to provide insights into industry trends and best practices.

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Enable the containerized Uyuni server to run on different host OS by j_renner

Description

The Uyuni server is provided as a container, but we still require it to run on Leap Micro? This is not how people expect to use containerized applications, so it would be great if we tested other host OSs and enabled them by providing builds of necessary tools for (e.g. mgradm). Interesting candidates should be:

• openSUSE Leap
• Cent OS 7
• Ubuntu
• ???

Goals

Make it really easy for anyone to run the Uyuni containerized server on whatever OS they want (with support for containers of course).

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Contributing to Linux Kernel security by pperego

Description

A couple of weeks ago, I found this blog post by Gustavo Silva, a Linux Kernel contributor.

I always strived to start again into hacking the Linux Kernel, so I asked Coverity scan dashboard access and I want to contribute to Linux Kernel by fixing some minor issues.

I want also to create a Linux Kernel fuzzing lab using qemu and syzkaller

Goals

1. Fix at least 2 security bugs
2. Create the fuzzing lab and having it running

The story so far

• Day 1: setting up a virtual machine for kernel development using Tumbleweed. Reading a lot of documentation, taking confidence with Coverity dashboard and with procedures to submit a kernel patch
• Day 2: I read really a lot of documentation and I triaged some findings on Coverity SAST dashboard. I have to confirm that SAST tool are great false positives generator, even for low hanging fruits.
• Day 3: Working on trivial changes after I read this blog post: https://www.toblux.com/posts/2024/02/linux-kernel-patches.html. I have to take confidence with the patch preparation and submit process yet.
  • First trivial patch sent: using strtruefalse() macro instead of hard-coded strings in a staging driver for a lcd display
  • Fix for a dereference before null check issue discovered by Coverity (CID 1601566) https://scan7.scan.coverity.com/#/project-view/52110/11354?selectedIssue=1601566
• Day 4: Triaging more issues found by Coverity.
  • The patch for CID 1601566 was refused. The check against the NULL pointer was pointless so I prepared a version 2 of the patch removing the check.
  • Fixed another dereference before NULL check in iwlmvmparsewowlaninfo_notif() routine (CID 1601547). This one was already submitted by another kernel hacker :(
• Day 5: Wrapping up. I had to do some minor rework on patch for CID 1601566. I found a stalker bothering me in private emails and people I interacted with me, advised he is a well known bothering person. Markus Elfring for the record.

• Wrapping up: being back doing kernel hacking is amazing and I don't want to stop it. My battery pack is completely drained but changing the scope gave me a great twist and I really want to feel this energy not doing a single task for months.

  I failed in setting up a fuzzing lab but I was too optimistic for the patch submission process.

The patches

1

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Model checking the BPF verifier by shunghsiyu

Project Description

BPF verifier plays a crucial role in securing the system (though less so now that unprivileged BPF is disabled by default in both upstream and SLES), and bugs in the verifier has lead to privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the past (e.g. CVE-2021-3490).

One way to check whether the verifer has bugs to use model checking (a formal verification technique), in other words, build a abstract model of how the verifier operates, and then see if certain condition can occur (e.g. incorrect calculation during value tracking of registers) by giving both the model and condition to a solver.

For the solver I will be using the Z3 SMT solver to do the checking since it provide a Python binding that's relatively easy to use.

Goal for this Hackweek

Learn how to use the Z3 Python binding (i.e. Z3Py) to build a model of (part of) the BPF verifier, probably the part that's related to value tracking using tristate numbers (aka tnum), and then check that the algorithm work as intended.

Resources

• Formal Methods for the Informal Engineer: Tutorial #1 - The Z3 Theorem Prover and its accompanying notebook is a great introduction into Z3
  • Has a section specifically on model checking
• Software Verification and Analysis Using Z3 a great example of using Z3 for model checking
• Sound, Precise, and Fast Abstract Interpretation with Tristate Numbers - existing work that use formal verification to prove that the multiplication helper used for value tracking work as intended
• [PATCH v5 net-next 00/12] bpf: rewrite value tracking in verifier - initial patch set that adds tristate number to the verifier

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VulnHeap by r1chard-lyu

Description

The VulnHeap project is dedicated to the in-depth analysis and exploitation of vulnerabilities within heap memory management. It focuses on understanding the intricate workflow of heap allocation, chunk structures, and bin management, which are essential to identifying and mitigating security risks.

Goals

• Familiarize with heap
  • Heap workflow
  • Chunk and bin structure
  • Vulnerabilities
• Vulnerability
  • Use after free (UAF)
  • Heap overflow
  • Double free
• Use Docker to create a vulnerable environment and apply techniques to exploit it

Resources

• https://heap-exploitation.dhavalkapil.com/divingintoglibc_heap
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cloudburst/libheap/master/heap.png
• https://github.com/shellphish/how2heap?tab=readme-ov-file

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Migrate from Docker to Podman by tjyrinki_suse

Description

I'd like to continue my former work on containerization of several domains on a single server by changing from Docker containers to Podman containers. That will need an OS upgrade as well as Podman is not available in that old server version.

Goals

• Update OS.
• Migrate from Docker to Podman.
• Keep everything functional, including the existing "meanwhile done" additional Docker container that is actually being used already.
• Keep everything at least as secure as currently. One of the reasons of having the containers is to isolate risks related to services open to public Internet.
• Try to enable the Podman use in production.
• At minimum, learn about all of these topics.
• Optionally, improve Ansible side of things as well...

Resources

A search engine is one's friend. Migrating from Docker to Podman, and from docker-compose to podman-compose.

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OIDC Loginproxy by toe

Description

Reverse proxies can be a useful option to separate authentication logic from application logic. SUSE and openSUSE use "loginproxies" as an authentication layer in front of several services.

Currently, loginproxies exist which support LDAP authentication or SAML authentication.

Goals

The goal of this Hack Week project is, to create another loginproxy which supports OpenID Connect authentication which can then act as a drop-in replacement for the existing LDAP or SAML loginproxies.

Testing is intended to focus on the integration with OIDC IDPs from Okta, KanIDM and Authentik.

Resources

• #122254: Migrate away from login proxies to SSO

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