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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Recipes catalog and calculator in Rails 8 by gfilippetti

My wife needs a website to catalog and sell the products of her upcoming bakery, and I need to learn and practice modern Rails. So I'm using this Hack Week to build a modern store using the latest Ruby on Rails best practices, ideally up to the deployment.

TO DO

• Index page
• Product page
• Admin area -- Supplies calculator based on orders -- Orders notification
• Authentication
• Payment
• Deployment

Day 1

As my Rails knowledge was pretty outdated and I had 0 experience with Turbo (wich I want to use in the app), I started following a turbo-rails course. I completed 5 of 11 chapters.

Day 2

Continued the course until chapter 8 and added live updates & an empty state to the app. I should finish the course on day 3 and start my own project with the knowledge from it.

Hackweek 25

For this Hackweek I'll continue this project, focusing on a Catalog/Calculator for my wife's recipes so she can use for her Café.

Day 1

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Create a go module to wrap happy-compta.fr by cbosdonnat

Description

https://happy-compta.fr is a tool for french work councils simple book keeping. While it does the job, it has no API to work with and it is tedious to enter loads of operations.

Goals

Write a go client module to be used as an API to programmatically manipulate the tool.

Writing an example tool to load data from a CSV file would be good too.

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Contribute to terraform-provider-libvirt by pinvernizzi

Description

The SUSE Manager (SUMA) teams' main tool for infrastructure automation, Sumaform, largely relies on terraform-provider-libvirt. That provider is also widely used by other teams, both inside and outside SUSE.

It would be good to help the maintainers of this project and give back to the community around it, after all the amazing work that has been already done.

If you're interested in any of infrastructure automation, Terraform, virtualization, tooling development, Go (...) it is also a good chance to learn a bit about them all by putting your hands on an interesting, real-use-case and complex project.

Goals

• Get more familiar with Terraform provider development and libvirt bindings in Go
• Solve some issues and/or implement some features
• Get in touch with the community around the project

Resources

• CONTRIBUTING readme
• Go libvirt library in use by the project
• Terraform plugin development
• "Good first issue" list

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Help Create A Chat Control Resistant Turnkey Chatmail/Deltachat Relay Stack - Rootless Podman Compose, OpenSUSE BCI, Hardened, & SELinux by 3nd5h1771fy

Description

The Mission: Decentralized & Sovereign Messaging

FYI: If you have never heard of "Chatmail", you can visit their site here, but simply put it can be thought of as the underlying protocol/platform decentralized messengers like DeltaChat use for their communications. Do not confuse it with the honeypot looking non-opensource paid for prodect with better seo that directs you to chatmailsecure(dot)com

In an era of increasing centralized surveillance by unaccountable bad actors (aka BigTech), "Chat Control," and the erosion of digital privacy, the need for sovereign communication infrastructure is critical. Chatmail is a pioneering initiative that bridges the gap between classic email and modern instant messaging, offering metadata-minimized, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) communication that is interoperable and open.

However, unless you are a seasoned sysadmin, the current recommended deployment method of a Chatmail relay is rigid, fragile, difficult to properly secure, and effectively takes over the entire host the "relay" is deployed on.

Why This Matters

A simple, host agnostic, reproducible deployment lowers the entry cost for anyone wanting to run a privacy‑preserving, decentralized messaging relay. In an era of perpetually resurrected chat‑control legislation threats, EU digital‑sovereignty drives, and many dangers of using big‑tech messaging platforms (Apple iMessage, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Instagram, SMS, Google Messages, etc...) for any type of communication, providing an easy‑to‑use alternative empowers:

• Censorship resistance - No single entity controls the relay; operators can spin up new nodes quickly.
  
• Surveillance mitigation - End‑to‑end OpenPGP encryption ensures relay operators never see plaintext.
  
• Digital sovereignty - Communities can host their own infrastructure under local jurisdiction, aligning with national data‑policy goals.
  

By turning the Chatmail relay into a plug‑and‑play container stack, we enable broader adoption, foster a resilient messaging fabric, and give developers, activists, and hobbyists a concrete tool to defend privacy online.

Goals

As I indicated earlier, this project aims to drastically simplify the deployment of Chatmail relay. By converting this architecture into a portable, containerized stack using Podman and OpenSUSE base container images, we can allow anyone to deploy their own censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving communications node in minutes.

Our goal for Hack Week: package every component into containers built on openSUSE/MicroOS base images, initially orchestrated with a single container-compose.yml (podman-compose compatible). The stack will:

• Run on any host that supports Podman (including optimizations and enhancements for SELinux‑enabled systems).
  
• Allow network decoupling by refactoring configurations to move from file-system constrained Unix sockets to internal TCP networking, allowing containers achieve stricter isolation.
• Utilize Enhanced Security with SELinux by using purpose built utilities such as udica we can quickly generate custom SELinux policies for the container stack, ensuring strict confinement superior to standard/typical Docker deployments.
• Allow the use of bind or remote mounted volumes for shared data (/var/vmail, DKIM keys, TLS certs, etc.).
  
• Replace the local DNS server requirement with a remote DNS‑provider API for DKIM/TXT record publishing.
  

By delivering a turnkey, host agnostic, reproducible deployment, we lower the barrier for individuals and small communities to launch their own chatmail relays, fostering a decentralized, censorship‑resistant messaging ecosystem that can serve DeltaChat users and/or future services adopting this protocol

Resources

• The links included above
• https://chatmail.at/doc/relay/
• https://delta.chat/en/help
• Project repo -> https://codeberg.org/EndShittification/containerized-chatmail-relay

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Play with the userfaultfd(2) system call and download on demand using HTTP Range Requests with Golang by rbranco

Description

The userfaultfd(2) is a cool system call to handle page faults in user-space. This should allow me to list the contents of an ISO or similar archive without downloading the whole thing. The userfaultfd(2) part can also be done in theory with the PROT_NONE mprotect + SIGSEGV trick, for complete Unix portability, though reportedly being slower.

Goals

1. Create my own library for userfaultfd(2) in Golang.
2. Create my own library for HTTP Range Requests.
3. Complete portability with Unix.
4. Benchmarks.
5. Contribute some tests to LTP.

Resources

1. https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/userfaultfd.html
2. https://www.cons.org/cracauer/cracauer-userfaultfd.html

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HTTP API for nftables by crameleon

Background

The idea originated in https://progress.opensuse.org/issues/164060 and is about building RESTful API which translates authorized HTTP requests to operations in nftables, possibly utilizing libnftables-json(5).

Originally, I started developing such an interface in Go, utilizing https://github.com/google/nftables. The conversion of string networks to nftables set elements was problematic (unfortunately no record of details), and I started a second attempt in Python, which made interaction much simpler thanks to native nftables Python bindings.

Goals

1. Find and track the issue with google/nftables
2. Revisit and polish the Go or Python code (prefer Go, but possibly depends on implementing missing functionality), primarily the server component
3. Finish functionality to interact with nftables sets (retrieving and updating elements), which are of interest for the originating issue
4. Align test suite
5. Packaging

Resources

• https://git.netfilter.org/nftables/tree/py/src/nftables.py
• https://git.com.de/Georg/nftables-http-api (to be moved to GitHub)
• https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:crameleon:containers/pytest-nftables-container

Results

• Started new https://github.com/tacerus/nftables-http-api.
• First Go nftables issue was related to set elements needing to be added with different start and end addresses - coincidentally, this was recently discovered by someone else, who added a useful helper function for this: https://github.com/google/nftables/pull/342.
• Further improvements submitted: https://github.com/google/nftables/pull/347.

Side results

Upon starting to unify the structure and implementing more functionality, missing JSON output support was noticed for some subcommands in libnftables. Submitted patches here as well:

• https://lore.kernel.org/netfilter-devel/20251203131736.4036382-2-georg@syscid.com/T/#u

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