A CLI for Harvester by mohamed.belgaied

Harvester does not officially come with a CLI tool, the user is supposed to interact with Harvester mostly through the UI. Though it is theoretically possible to use kubectl to interact with Harvester, the manipulation of Kubevirt YAML objects is absolutely not user friendly. Inspired by tools like multipass from Canonical to easily and rapidly create one of multiple VMs, I began the development of Harvester CLI. Currently, it works but Harvester CLI needs some love to be up-to-date with Harvester v1.0.2 and needs some bug fixes and improvements as well.

Project Description

Harvester CLI is a command line interface tool written in Go, designed to simplify interfacing with a Harvester cluster as a user. It is especially useful for testing purposes as you can easily and rapidly create VMs in Harvester by providing a simple command such as: harvester vm create my-vm --count 5 to create 5 VMs named my-vm-01 to my-vm-05.

Harvester CLI is functional but needs a number of improvements: up-to-date functionality with Harvester v1.0.2 (some minor issues right now), modifying the default behaviour to create an opensuse VM instead of an ubuntu VM, solve some bugs, etc.

Github Repo for Harvester CLI: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli

Done in previous Hackweeks

• Create a Github actions pipeline to automatically integrate Harvester CLI to Homebrew repositories: DONE
• Automatically package Harvester CLI for OpenSUSE / Redhat RPMs or DEBs: DONE

Goal for this Hackweek

The goal for this Hackweek is to bring Harvester CLI up-to-speed with latest Harvester versions (v1.3.X and v1.4.X), and improve the code quality as well as implement some simple features and bug fixes.

Some nice additions might be: * Improve handling of namespaced objects * Add features, such as network management or Load Balancer creation ? * Add more unit tests and, why not, e2e tests * Improve CI * Improve the overall code quality * Test the program and create issues for it

Issue list is here: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli/issues

Resources

The project is written in Go, and using client-go the Kubernetes Go Client libraries to communicate with the Harvester API (which is Kubernetes in fact). Welcome contributions are:

• Testing it and creating issues
• Documentation
• Go code improvement

What you might learn

Harvester CLI might be interesting to you if you want to learn more about:

• GitHub Actions
• Harvester as a SUSE Product
• Go programming language
• Kubernetes API
• Kubevirt API objects (Manipulating VMs and VM Configuration in Kubernetes using Kubevirt)

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Preparing KubeVirtBMC for project transfer to the KubeVirt organization by zchang

Description

KubeVirtBMC is preparing to transfer the project to the KubeVirt organization. One requirement is to enhance the modeling design's security. The current v1alpha1 API (the VirtualMachineBMC CRD) was designed during the proof-of-concept stage. It's immature and inherently insecure due to its cross-namespace object references, exposing security concerns from an RBAC perspective.

The other long-awaited feature is the ability to mount virtual media so that virtual machines can boot from remote ISO images.

Goals

1. Deliver the v1beta1 API and its corresponding controller implementation
2. Enable the Redfish virtual media mount function for KubeVirt virtual machines

Resources

• The KubeVirtBMC repo: https://github.com/starbops/kubevirtbmc
• The new v1beta1 API: https://github.com/starbops/kubevirtbmc/issues/83
• Redfish virtual media mount: https://github.com/starbops/kubevirtbmc/issues/44

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The Agentic Rancher Experiment: Do Androids Dream of Electric Cattle? by moio

Rancher is a beast of a codebase. Let's investigate if the new 2025 generation of GitHub Autonomous Coding Agents and Copilot Workspaces can actually tame it.

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The Plan

Create a sandbox GitHub Organization, clone in key Rancher repositories, and let the AI loose to see if it can handle real-world enterprise OSS maintenance - or if it just hallucinates new breeds of Kubernetes resources!

Specifically, throw "Agentic Coders" some typical tasks in a complex, long-lived open-source project, such as:

❥ The Grunt Work: generate missing GoDocs, unit tests, and refactorings. Rebase PRs.

❥ The Complex Stuff: fix actual (historical) bugs and feature requests to see if they can traverse the complexity without (too much) human hand-holding.

❥ Hunting Down Gaps: find areas lacking in docs, areas of improvement in code, dependency bumps, and so on.

If time allows, also experiment with Model Context Protocol (MCP) to give agents context on our specific build pipelines and CI/CD logs.

Why?

We know AI can write "Hello World." and also moderately complex programs from a green field. But can it rebase a 3-month-old PR with conflicts in rancher/rancher? I want to find the breaking point of current AI agents to determine if and how they can help us to reduce our technical debt, work faster and better. At the same time, find out about pitfalls and shortcomings.

The CONCLUSION!!!

A State of the Union document was compiled to summarize lessons learned this week. For more gory details, just read on the diary below!

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Cluster API Provider for Harvester by rcase

Project Description

The Cluster API "infrastructure provider" for Harvester, also named CAPHV, makes it possible to use Harvester with Cluster API. This enables people and organisations to create Kubernetes clusters running on VMs created by Harvester using a declarative spec.

The project has been bootstrapped in HackWeek 23, and its code is available here.

Work done in HackWeek 2023

• Have a early working version of the provider available on Rancher Sandbox : *DONE *
• Demonstrated the created cluster can be imported using Rancher Turtles: DONE
• Stretch goal - demonstrate using the new provider with CAPRKE2: DONE and the templates are available on the repo

DONE in HackWeek 24:

• Add more Unit Tests
• Improve Status Conditions for some phases
• Add cloud provider config generation
• Testing with Harvester v1.3.2
• Template improvements
• Issues creation

DONE in 2025 (out of Hackweek)

• Support of ClusterClass
• Add to clusterctl community providers, you can add it directly with clusterctl
• Testing on newer versions of Harvester v1.4.X and v1.5.X
• Support for clusterctl generate cluster ...
• Improve Status Conditions to reflect current state of Infrastructure
• Improve CI (some bugs for release creation)

Goals for HackWeek 2025

• FIRST and FOREMOST, any topic is important to you
• Add e2e testing
• Certify the provider for Rancher Turtles
• Add Machine pool labeling
• Add PCI-e passthrough capabilities.
• Other improvement suggestions are welcome!

Thanks to @isim and Dominic Giebert for their contributions!

Resources

Looking for help from anyone interested in Cluster API (CAPI) or who wants to learn more about Harvester.

This will be an infrastructure provider for Cluster API. Some background reading for the CAPI aspect:

• Cluster infrastructure provider contract
• Machine infrastructure provider contract

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Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher by ademicev0

Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher

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Description

The Problem

Running LLMs can get expensive and complex pretty quickly.

Today there are typically two choices:

1. Use cloud APIs like OpenAI or Anthropic. Easy to start with, but costs add up at scale.
2. Self-host everything - set up Kubernetes, figure out GPU scheduling, handle scaling, manage model serving... it's a lot of work.

What if there was a middle ground?

What if infrastructure scaled itself instead of making you scale it?

Can we use existing Rancher capabilities like CAPI, autoscaling, and GitOps to make this simpler instead of building everything from scratch?

Project Repository: github.com/alexander-demicev/llmserverless

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What This Project Does

A key feature is hybrid deployment: requests can be routed based on complexity or privacy needs. Simple or low-sensitivity queries can use public APIs (like OpenAI), while complex or private requests are handled in-house on local infrastructure. This flexibility allows balancing cost, privacy, and performance - using cloud for routine tasks and on-premises resources for sensitive or demanding workloads.

A complete, self-scaling LLM infrastructure that:

• Scales to zero when idle (no idle costs)
• Scales up automatically when requests come in
• Adds more nodes when needed, removes them when demand drops
• Runs on any infrastructure - laptop, bare metal, or cloud

Think of it as "serverless for LLMs" - focus on building, the infrastructure handles itself.

How It Works

A combination of open source tools working together:

Flow:

• Users interact with OpenWebUI (chat interface)
• Requests go to LiteLLM Gateway
• LiteLLM routes requests to:
  • Ollama (Knative) for local model inference (auto-scales pods)
  • Or cloud APIs for fallback

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Build a terminal user-interface (TUI) for Agama by IGonzalezSosa

Description

Officially, Agama offers two different user interfaces. On the one hand, we have the web-based interface, which is the one you see when you run the installation media. On the other hand, we have a command-line interface. In both cases, you can use them using a remote system, either using a browser or the agama CLI.

We would expect most of the cases to be covered by this approach. However, if you cannot use the web-based interface and, for some reason, you cannot access the system through the network, your only option is to use the CLI. This interface offers a mechanism to modify Agama's configuration using an editor (vim, by default), but perhaps you might want to have a more user-friendly way.

Goals

The main goal of this project is to built a minimal terminal user-interface for Agama. This interface will allow the user to install the system providing just a few settings (selecting a product, a storage device and a user password). Then it should report the installation progress.

Resources

• https://agama-project.github.io/
• https://ratatui.rs/

Conclusions

We have summarized our conclusions in a pull request. It includes screenshots ;-) We did not implement all the features we wanted, but we learn a lot during the process. We know that, if needed, we could write a TUI for Agama and we have an idea about how to build it. Good enough.

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Arcticwolf - A rust based user space NFS server by vcheng

Description

Rust has similar performance to C. Also, have a better async IO module and high integration with io_uring. This project aims to develop a user-space NFS server based on Rust.

Goals

• Get an understanding of how cargo works
• Get an understanding of how XDR was generated with xdrgen
• Create the RUST-based NFS server that supports basic operations like mount/readdir/read/write

Result (2025 Hackweek)

• In progress PR: https://github.com/Vicente-Cheng/arcticwolf/pull/1

Resources

https://github.com/Vicente-Cheng/arcticwolf

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Exploring Rust's potential: from basics to security by sferracci

Description

This project aims to conduct a focused investigation and practical application of the Rust programming language, with a specific emphasis on its security model. A key component will be identifying and understanding the most common vulnerabilities that can be found in Rust code.

Goals

Achieve a beginner/intermediate level of proficiency in writing Rust code. This will be measured by trying to solve LeetCode problems focusing on common data structures and algorithms. Study Rust vulnerabilities and learning best practices to avoid them.

Resources

Rust book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

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Learn a bit of embedded programming with Rust in a micro:bit v2 by aplanas

Description

micro:bit is a small single board computer with a ARM Cortex-M4 with the FPU extension, with a very constrain amount of memory and a bunch of sensors and leds.

The board is very well documented, with schematics and code for all the features available, so is an excellent platform for learning embedded programming.

Rust is a system programming language that can generate ARM code, and has crates (libraries) to access the micro:bit hardware. There is plenty documentation about how to make small programs that will run in the micro:bit.

Goals

Start learning about embedded programming in Rust, and maybe make some code to the small KS4036F Robot car from keyestudio.

Resources

• micro:bit
• KS4036F
• microbit technical documentation
• schematic
• impl Rust for micro:bit
• Rust Embedded MB2 Discovery Book
• nRF-HAL
• nRF Microbit-v2 BSP (blocking)
• knurling-rs
• C++ microbit codal
• microbit-bsp for Embassy
• Embassy

Diary

Day 1

• Start reading https://mb2.implrust.com/abstraction-layers.html
• Prepare the dev environment (cross compiler, probe-rs)
• Flash first code in the board (blinky led)
• Checking differences between BSP and HAL
• Compile and install a more complex example, with stack protection
• Reading about the simplicity of xtask, as alias for workspace execution
• Reading the CPP code of the official micro:bit libraries. They have a font!

Day 2

• There are multiple BSP for the microbit. One is using async code for non-blocking operations
• Download and study a bit the API for microbit-v2, the nRF official crate
• Take a look of the KS4036F programming, seems that the communication is multiplexed via I2C
• The motor speed can be selected via PWM (pulse with modulation): power it longer (high frequency), and it will increase the speed
• Scrolling some text
• Debug by printing! defmt is a crate that can be used with probe-rs to emit logs
• Start reading input from the board: buttons
• The logo can be touched and detected as a floating point value

Day 3

• A bit confused how to read the float value from a pin

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RMT.rs: High-Performance Registration Path for RMT using Rust by gbasso

Description

The SUSE Repository Mirroring Tool (RMT) is a critical component for managing software updates and subscriptions, especially for our Public Cloud Team (PCT). In a cloud environment, hundreds or even thousands of new SUSE instances (VPS/EC2) can be provisioned simultaneously. Each new instance attempts to register against an RMT server, creating a "thundering herd" scenario.

We have observed that the current RMT server, written in Ruby, faces performance issues under this high-concurrency registration load. This can lead to request overhead, slow registration times, and outright registration failures, delaying the readiness of new cloud instances.

This Hackweek project aims to explore a solution by re-implementing the performance-critical registration path in Rust. The goal is to leverage Rust's high performance, memory safety, and first-class concurrency handling to create an alternative registration endpoint that is fast, reliable, and can gracefully manage massive, simultaneous request spikes.

The new Rust module will be integrated into the existing RMT Ruby application, allowing us to directly compare the performance of both implementations.

Goals

The primary objective is to build and benchmark a high-performance Rust-based alternative for the RMT server registration endpoint.

Key goals for the week:

1. Analyze & Identify: Dive into the SUSE/rmt Ruby codebase to identify and map out the exact critical path for server registration (e.g., controllers, services, database interactions).
2. Develop in Rust: Implement a functionally equivalent version of this registration logic in Rust.
3. Integrate: Explore and implement a method for Ruby/Rust integration to "hot-wire" the new Rust module into the RMT application. This may involve using FFI, or libraries like rb-sys or magnus.
4. Benchmark: Create a benchmarking script (e.g., using k6, ab, or a custom tool) that simulates the high-concurrency registration load from thousands of clients.
5. Compare & Present: Conduct a comparative performance analysis (requests per second, latency, success/error rates, CPU/memory usage) between the original Ruby path and the new Rust path. The deliverable will be this data and a summary of the findings.

Resources

• RMT Source Code (Ruby):
  • https://github.com/SUSE/rmt
• RMT Documentation:
  • https://documentation.suse.com/sles/15-SP7/html/SLES-all/book-rmt.html
• Tooling & Stacks:
  • RMT/Ruby development environment (for running the base RMT)
  • Rust development environment (rustup, cargo)
• Potential Integration Libraries:
  • rb-sys: https://github.com/oxidize-rb/rb-sys
  • Magnus: https://github.com/matsadler/magnus
• Benchmarking Tools:
  • k6 (https://k6.io/)
  • ab (ApacheBench)

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