Officially Become a Kernel Hacker! by m.crivellari

Description

My studies as well my spare time are dedicated to the Linux Kernel. Currently I'm focusing on interrupts on x86_64, but my interests are not restricted to one specific topic, for now.

I also "played" a little bit with kernel modules (ie lantern, a toy packet analyzer) and I've added a new syscall in order read from a task A, the memory of a task B.

Maybe this will be a good chance to...

Goals

• create my first kernel patch

Resources

• https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-patches.html
• https://git-send-email.io/ (mentioned also in the kernel doc)
• https://javiercarrascocruz.github.io/kernel-contributor-1

Achivements

• found while working on a bug, this is the 1st patch: cifs: avoid deadlocks while updating iface [✅ has been merged]

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.

Kill DMA and DMA32 memory zones by ptesarik

Description

Provide a better allocator for DMA-capable buffers, making the DMA and DMA32 zones obsolete.

Goals

Make a PoC kernel which can boot a x86 VM and a Raspberry Pi (because early RPi4 boards have some of the weirdest DMA constraints).

Resources

• LPC2024 talk:
• video:

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

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

Yearly Quality Engineering Ask me Anything - AMA for not-engineering by szarate

Goal

Get a closer look at how developers work on the Engineering team (R & D) of SUSE, and close the collaboration gap between GSI and Engineering

Why?

Santiago can go over different development workflows, and can do a deepdive into how Quality Engineering works (think of my QE Team, the advocates for your customers), The idea of this session is to help open the doors to opportunities for collaboration, and broaden our understanding of SUSE as a whole.

Objectives

• Give $audience a small window on how to get some questions answered either on the spot or within days of how some things at engineering are done
• Give Santiago Zarate from Quality Engineering a look into how $audience sees the engineering departments, and find out possibilities of further collaboration

How?

By running an "Ask me Anything" session, which is a format of a kind of open Q & A session, where participants ask the host multiple questions.

How to make it happen?

I'm happy to help joining a call or we can do it async (online/in person is more fun). Ping me over email-slack and lets make the magic happen!. Doesn't need to be during hackweek, but we gotta kickstart the idea during hackweek ;)

Rules

The rules are simple, the more questions the more fun it will be; while this will be only a window into engineering, it can also be the place to help all of us get to a similar level of understanding of the processes that are behind our respective areas of the organization.

Dynamics

The host will be monitoring the questions on some pre-agreed page, and try to answer to the best of their knowledge, if a question is too difficult or the host doesn't have the answer, he will do his best to provide an answer at a later date.

Atendees are encouraged to add questions beforehand; in the case there aren't any, we would be looking at how Quality Engineering tests new products or performs regression tests

Agenda

• Introduction of Santiago Zarate, Product Owner of Quality Engineering Core team
• Introduction of the Group/Team/Persons interested
• Ice breaker
• AMA time! Add your questions $PAGE
• Looking at QE Workflows: How is
  • A maintenance update being tested before being released to our customers
  • Products in development are tested before making it generally available
• Engineering Opportunity Board

Make more sense of openQA test results using AI by livdywan

Description

AI has the potential to help with something many of us spend a lot of time doing which is making sense of openQA logs when a job fails.

User Story

Allison Average has a puzzled look on their face while staring at log files that seem to make little sense. Is this a known issue, something completely new or maybe related to infrastructure changes?

Goals

• Leverage a chat interface to help Allison
• Create a model from scratch based on data from openQA
• Proof of concept for automated analysis of openQA test results

Bonus

• Use AI to suggest solutions to merge conflicts
  • This would need a merge conflict editor that can suggest solving the conflict
• Use image recognition for needles

Resources

• TensorFlow
• open-webui
• openQA instance of openSUSE
• openQA documentation

Timeline

Day 1

• Conversing with open-webui to teach me how to create a model based on openQA test results
  • Asking for example code using TensorFlow in Python
  • Discussing log files to explore what to analyze
  • Drafting a new project called Testimony (based on Implementing a containerized Python action) - the project name was also suggested by the assistant

Day 2

• Using NotebookLLM (Gemini) to produce conversational versions of blog posts
  • Writing openQA tests in Python
  • Developing in distrobox containers
• Researching the possibility of creating a project logo with AI
  • Asking open-webui, persons with prior experience and conducting a web search for advice

Highlights

• I briefly tested compared models to see if they would make me more productive. Between llama, gemma and mistral there was no amazing difference in the results for my case.
• Convincing the chat interface to produce code specific to my use case required very explicit instructions.
• Asking for advice on how to use open-webui itself better was frustratingly unfruitful both in trivial and more advanced regards.
• Documentation on source materials used by LLM's and tools for this purpose seems virtually non-existent - specifically if a logo can be generated based on particular licenses

Outcomes

• Chat interface-supported development is providing good starting points and open-webui being open source is more flexible than Gemini. Although currently some fancy features such as grounding and generated podcasts are missing.
• Allison still has to be very experienced with openQA to use a chat interface for test review. Publicly available system prompts would make that easier, though.

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

Automated Test Report reviewer by oscar-barrios

Description

In SUMA/Uyuni team we spend a lot of time reviewing test reports, analyzing each of the test cases failing, checking if the test is a flaky test, checking logs, etc.

Goals

Speed up the review by automating some parts through AI, in a way that we can consume some summary of that report that could be meaningful for the reviewer.

Resources

No idea about the resources yet, but we will make use of:

• HTML/JSON Report (text + screenshots)
• The Test Suite Status GithHub board (via API)
• The environment tested (via SSH)
• The test framework code (via files)

Testing and adding GNU/Linux distributions on Uyuni by juliogonzalezgil

Join the Gitter channel! https://gitter.im/uyuni-project/hackweek

Uyuni is a configuration and infrastructure management tool that saves you time and headaches when you have to manage and update tens, hundreds or even thousands of machines. It also manages configuration, can run audits, build image containers, monitor and much more!

Currently there are a few distributions that are completely untested on Uyuni or SUSE Manager (AFAIK) or just not tested since a long time, and could be interesting knowing how hard would be working with them and, if possible, fix whatever is broken.

For newcomers, the easiest distributions are those based on DEB or RPM packages. Distributions with other package formats are doable, but will require adapting the Python and Java code to be able to sync and analyze such packages (and if salt does not support those packages, it will need changes as well). So if you want a distribution with other packages, make sure you are comfortable handling such changes.

No developer experience? No worries! We had non-developers contributors in the past, and we are ready to help as long as you are willing to learn. If you don't want to code at all, you can also help us preparing the documentation after someone else has the initial code ready, or you could also help with testing :-)

The idea is testing Salt and Salt-ssh clients, but NOT traditional clients, which are deprecated.

To consider that a distribution has basic support, we should cover at least (points 3-6 are to be tested for both salt minions and salt ssh minions):

1. Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)
2. Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap scritp, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator)
3. Package management (install, remove, update...)
4. Patching
5. Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
6. Salt remote commands
7. Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement
8. Bonus point: sumaform enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/sumaform)
9. Bonus point: Documentation (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni-docs)
10. Bonus point: testsuite enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni/tree/master/testsuite)

If something is breaking: we can try to fix it, but the main idea is research how supported it is right now. Beyond that it's up to each project member how much to hack :-)

• If you don't have knowledge about some of the steps: ask the team
• If you still don't know what to do: switch to another distribution and keep testing.

This card is for EVERYONE, not just developers. Seriously! We had people from other teams helping that were not developers, and added support for Debian and new SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Leap versions :-)

Pending

FUSS

FUSS is a complete GNU/Linux solution (server, client and desktop/standalone) based on Debian for managing an educational network.

https://fuss.bz.it/

Seems to be a Debian 12 derivative, so adding it could be quite easy.

• [W] Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)
• [W] Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap script, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator) --> Working for all 3 options (salt minion UI, salt minion bootstrap script and salt-ssh minion from the UI).
• [W] Package management (install, remove, update...) --> Installing a new package works, needs to test the rest.
• [I] Patching (if patch information is available, could require writing some code to parse it, but IIRC we have support for Ubuntu already). No patches detected. Do we support patches for Debian at all?
• [W] Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
• [W] Salt remote commands
• [ ] Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement