openSUSE 13.2 is taking shape on ARM, but we need to make sure we smoothen its edges to make an actual release out of it. The goal of this project is to make sure all devices we should run on actually work and that the last few packages necessary for productive use of ARM devices work properly on 13.2.

Having gotten access to some SMR prototypes it should be possible to tweak btrfs to run natively on those devices. Using SSD mode helps a lot, but there is still some work to be done. So this will be a good chance to learn something about the inner details of btrfs and see if I can get it to run on SMR drives.

This is the tool I've been working on since HW11 and it needs more work. Actually, there's always something which could be done on it. It is basically an x86 instruction decoder with special emphasis on the kernel and decoding interesting pieces of it in order to help in the development of low-level patching techniques, among others. git repo: https://gitlab.suse.de/bp/x86d

Project Description

In last hackweek, I implemented a RSA private key parser in kernel: https://github.com/SUSE/hackweek/wiki/RSA-private-key-parser-in-kernel

In last hackweek, I implemented a RSA private key parser in kernel: https://github.com/SUSE/hackweek/wiki/RSA-private-key-parser-in-kernel

In last hackweek, I implemented a RSA private key parser in kernel: https://github.com/SUSE/hackweek/wiki/RSA-private-key-parser-in-kernel

Currently GCC relies only on the most generic alias analysis when attempting to track data in aggregates in interprocedural (IPA) optimizations. In the course of this project I plan to revive patches for using simple escape analysis to track all data which do not have their address escaped and use that information to track constants within them, analyze the impact on a number of benchmarks and submit them to GCC trunk.

As every hackweek, lets package/update/cleanup some stuff fore factory: Update/package:

Enhance the YaST ncurses package installation to show the changelog of a package and the level of supportability (on SLE).

Package a basic, stripped down version of sysvinit for emergency cases, so you can repair a failed system without interference. My goal is not to replace systemd with sysvinit again, but to provide a sysvinit-base package that does not have any dependencies at all and can just be installed on any system. sysvinit will only be used in exception situations by specifying the kernel parameter "init=/sbin/init" or something like that. The package will come with the binary, a minimal inittab and a basic boot script that does only the really needed stuff. Experiment with an extension to have sysvinit execve systemd, so people can boot into their allmighty uber-daemon once the system has been fixed.

While packaging node.js modules, which often depend on specific versions of other node.js modules, sometimes many of them, you easily end up in dependency hell, and maintaining an OBS project with a few hundred of those modules can be a tedious task. So the idea for this project is to familiarise myself with how exactly dependencies are managed on package and repository level, check out what tools exist to drill into dependency data, and hack something that helps keeping OBS repositories in a dependency consistent state.

We had a quick course of Coccinelle during the last Labs conference. The tool is really great and I would like to explore possibility of checking lock invariants for particular functions. Julia was really prompt and implemented something that should help but I didn't get to it since the conference.

Packman reduction

This is about writing a tool to find differences in assembly files generated by gcc. The goal is to find the symbols in a program that have changed by a source code patch. This information can then be used to create and/or verify kGraft patches.

While in the past MIPS boards were either low-end PIC32 or found in routers running OpenWRT at most, Imagination themselves have recently released the Creator CI20 board (Ingenic, MIPS32) running Debian. And the Shield Pro (previously iGuardian) kickstarter project (Octeon-III, MIPS64) promises to become a playground for testing KVM hardware virtualization. Porting openSUSE to MIPS will involve setting up an OBS instance linked to Factory (update: done) and cross-compiling a set of packages for an initial bootstrap (update: in progress). Maybe this can be scripted to some degree, as there will be some overlap with the ARM ILP32 port project.

Last time I checked QEMU lacked support for >= z10 processors. Thus one cannot run SLE12 and newer in a virtual machine on non-s390x host. I'd like to improve the situation during Hackweeks.

While in the past MIPS boards were either low-end PIC32 or found in routers running OpenWRT at most, Imagination themselves have recently released the Creator CI20 board (Ingenic, MIPS32) running Debian. And the Shield Pro (previously iGuardian) kickstarter project (Octeon-III, MIPS64) promises to become a playground for testing KVM hardware virtualization. Porting openSUSE to MIPS will involve setting up an OBS instance linked to Factory (update: done) and cross-compiling a set of packages for an initial bootstrap (update: in progress). Maybe this can be scripted to some degree, as there will be some overlap with the ARM ILP32 port project.

L3 bug reproduction often requires becoming the admin for a moment. I'd like to write down some nifty tricks I used to get certain “interesting” system configurations to work.

Our previous efforts to enable gdb to open kdumps was not received in upstream as well as we hoped for. The perhaps-acceptable way would be to extend gdb with the possibility of implementing targets in Python, then create example binding to libkdumpfile (which already got a Python binding). We've already tried that, yet it has to be tidyed up. So this project aims at:

The openSUSE build service could build hundreds of packages in parallel but in practice serial package dependencies prevent that.

The openSUSE build service could build hundreds of packages in parallel but in practice serial package dependencies prevent that.

Every packager encounters boring manual tasks every once in a while and these tasks can most probably be automated to some extent. During Hackweek I aim to try and identify such cases in various packagers' workflow and consider creating a tool that would make these tasks easier. Also, I would like to find out whether there is a demand for such tool. In that case, this Hackweek project will turn into a long-term task I plan to keep working on.

What is Qubes OS

Qubes OS is an operating system based on Linux with security in mind.

This is the tool I've been working on since HW11 and it needs more work. Actually, there's always something which could be done on it. It is basically an x86 instruction decoder with special emphasis on the kernel and decoding interesting pieces of it in order to help in the development of low-level patching techniques, among others. git repo: https://gitlab.suse.de/bp/x86d

Summary

A software developer, in particular at SUSE, needs a reliable and robust mail client.

We want to improve translation of dependencies done by spec-cleaner (i.e. cmake(blah)) and so on - see github.

Installation time is important as shorter installation allows everyone to safe resources and their time. It also can make better impression when starting with openSUSE and SUSE. And last but not least as we more frequently use openQA, so we do hundreds of installation every week, it even smaller improvement can in the end help SUSE to safe resources and be more green. Result of Project

Marvin is a job scheduler that the Performance Team at SUSE Labs uses to automate the execution of the performance test suite MMTests. For more details on what Marvin does and how, see Mel Gorman's blog post "Continual Testing of Mainline Kernels". At the moment the reporting dashboard is extremely minimal and lack usability features; the for example SLE-12-SLE-12-SP2 or any other .html file at http://laplace.suse.de/marvin.

Continuing last year tweaks of packman project we should proceed in the good work and reduce the packman to provide smallest set of packages possible on Tumbleweed (later on inherited by 43.0...). One of the cool results planned is that on stock openSUSE Tumbleweed user will be able to run most of the multimedia apps and play youtube (this is already working) and also with addition of non-free repository being able to run netflix.

Implement a basic file search for a given OBS project. An example of basic functionality can already be found for Ubuntu or Debian. The goal is to implement,

Features

I want to get started with developing apps for phones and tablets. It is a very general idea, rather open ended. To have tangible results, I want to make a trivial app and publish it in the official Google Play store: Just Roll One Die.

The openSUSE build service could build hundreds of packages in parallel but in practice serial package dependencies prevent that.

retro-gtk is a toolkit for GTK+-based Libretro frontends. It is mainly used by GNOME Games to play retro games via Libretro gaming console emulators. Currenly retro-gtk supports only software rendering. There are two ways hardware rendering can be used in retro-gtk:

New Development In previous hack weeks, the first few days ended up being wasted on just getting it working. I'm pleased to share that the code quality has improved dramatically since the last hack week and there are now extensive test cases for both unit testing and testing against real vmcores, and we'll use both mypy and pylint (if installed) to perform static analysis. Packages for those are available in openSUSE or as part of the crash-python OBS repo for SLE15. It has been tested with kernels from 3.0 to 5.1.

port notmuch/muchsync to android, with some java ui on top

I am currently using odpdown for presentations (tl;dr: it lets you write your slides in Markdown and generates Libreoffice slides from that and a Libreoffice slide master (such as a corporate identity template)). It is currently not available in OpenSUSE so it needs to be packaged and submitted to Factory. If somebody other than me wants to take this on, please ping me. There used to be a package in the author's home project on OBS which has since vanished. I think I've still got a checkout somewhere...

kCFI is a tool that enables the compilation of commodity Operating Systems with Control-Flow Integrity protection. kCFI first prototype was developed/implemented during a PhD program held in the University of Campinas, in Brazil. Although fully functional, the tool remains in a very experimental shape, needing to be refactored prior to being released. As kCFI consists in multiple tools, which include compiler plugins, kernel patches and binary analyzers, its deployment is considerably complex. Once code refactoring is finished, the next step consists in setting up proper repositories for the tool and for each submodule, along with scripts and documentation to enable easy configuration and compilation on new environments.

Implement a basic file search for a given OBS project. An example of basic functionality can already be found for Ubuntu or Debian. The goal is to implement,

Features

This is the tool I've been working on since HW11 and it needs more work. Actually, there's always something which could be done on it. It is basically an x86 instruction decoder with special emphasis on the kernel and decoding interesting pieces of it in order to help in the development of low-level patching techniques, among others. git repo: https://gitlab.suse.de/bp/x86d

There are plenty of old games that were compiled for Linux - particularly in Loki times around 2000. Let's see whether they can be played on a modern distribution, and how many compatibility layers are required.

Let's dust off our Amigas, hook up our mice and joysticks, and see what elegant software and hardware could do back in the 80s and 90s!

zypp-closure is a small helper tool making use of libzypp and the metadata of product repositories. The idea is to generate a dependency closure for a package or list of packages based on repositories metadata.

From a user perspective there are many ways to secure email communication with pgp. Especially the key handling is still challenging non tekkis. This project investigates processes techniques that are easier to handle for users by introducing hardware tokens for storing the private key.

Since Firefox 57, SUSE's default browser no longer supports XUL extensions. This is a problem for those of us who customized Firefox extensively with multiple addons. There are other Firefox forks out there, but Waterfox is based on v56, the most recent version of Firefox before the switch to Quantum -- https://www.waterfoxproject.org/en-US/

strace can parse syscall arg structures and print them in user-friendly way. For ioctl syscalls there is greater variety of the structures and not all are supported. Let's start with covering autofs data.

Somebody do something! Goals

Currently, each filesystem developer does his fstests runs (a testsuite for regression-testing of filesystems) on his dedicated test machine, on Orthos machine, ... This not only means duplication of efforts to automate this testing but also leads to inefficient use of resources (sometimes the test machine is just idle, sometimes you would need more tests to run in parallel to speed up development). The goal of this effort is to use SUSE Engineering Cloud to implement fire-and-forget fstests runs where you specify kernel to test (fetched from git tree or so), fstests configs to run, and then just pick up test results later on...

grub2-minimize-config

Replace the config-generating scripts to generate a minimalist grub2 config

There seems to be an overall consensus that the ioctl interface used by ethtool is a poor design as it's inflexible, error prone and notoriously hard to extend. It should clearly be replaced by netlink and obsoleted. Unfortunately not much actual work has been done in that direction until this project started. The project started in Hackweek 16 (fall 2017) and has been worked on since, both in Hackweek 17-19 and outside. First two parts of kernel implementation are in mainline since 5.6-rc1, first part of userspace implementation (ethtool utility) has been submitted to upstream at the end of Hackweek 19 (2020-02-16).

The state of the art of sysv/posix ipc benchmarking is a combination of ad-hoc programs scattered over the internet. While some mechanisms, such as sysv semaphores, have a lot of coverage, others really lack (message queues), and some are simply non-existent; albeit some of the legacy flavors we aren't too concerned with, other than them being functionally correct. Consolidate all this by taking the good benchmarks and implement new ones where needed, such as message queues, everything around the 'perf bench' framework. This will both improve the lives of us who hack on kenrel ipc as well as improve coverage overall. Eventually mmtests should be updated as well.

RISC-V is an open ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) based on RISC architecture. It's originated from UC Berkeley and it's attracting more attention in recent years because of its full open architecture so every developer has opportunities to get involved in application processor design or apply it into different applications, such as IoT, Robotics, ... etc. Any topic about RISC-V is welcome, here are some topics you might be interested in:

Project Description

Make supportconfig aware cgroup.

Project Description

RPMs with reflinkable content that leverage CoW filesystem features could help to minimize disk writes and space usage, reduce cpu cycles and download bandwidth for updates.

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).

Project Description

Different people use different ad-hoc tools to debug Linux kernel MM (memory management) related issues. I have couple of those myself. They fall into two main categories. One set for proper data collection and the other for some high level analysis. Our customers would benefit from the former and we (L3 labs from the later). Having them in a single package sounds quite reasonable to me.

Project Description

KernelCI is gaining more and more attraction for CI builds and test runs by the upstream community. Though at this point, there is no dash board to track or visualize regressions over time.

Project Description

As I do not work as a developer per se, I love developing new code and learning new technologies that arise in this world. The Rust language is defined as Rust is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose programming language. Rust emphasizes performance, type safety, and concurrency.

Project Description

Following a recent discussion with the Packaging team at SUSE we will do a revamp of https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Packaging

Project Description

This project was initially created for my graduation project. Currently, I've finished

Project Description

A visualization tool that directly digests ftrace function traces and provides easier to understand timing diagrams with the ability to quickly look up functions from within the program.

Project Description

The main goal is to enable the use of plain dm-crypt (as btrfs makes LVM2 unnecessary overhead) and a separate ephemeral key for the swap partition.

Project Description

There's Elixir for browsing mainline Linux releases. We should set up a similar system for SUSE kernel releases.

Project Description

SUSE IT needs help from fellow geekos with release engineering skills to define the requirements, process, infrastructure, and tools for building an openSUSE-based distribution bundled with SUSE IT-supported application stack. The resulting OS build will be offered as a standard distribution for new SUSE employees in addition to the existing Operating System library.

Project Description

Let's write a decent replacement for software-o-o. We want to choose the right technologies for the project, as technologies and missing volunteers is where we failed this time.

Project Description

Looking for ways to capture hardware-specific data and use them later to predict unexpected behaviors. Tools can be collectd, prometheus-nodeexporter, ipmiexporter , grafana-agent or other.

Project Description

I would like to be able to give my fingers a well deserved rest from time to time, so I'd love to be able to either control my computer with voice or simply dictate to it, for writing emails and so on, and if possible... even writing some code using my voice!

Let's pick some old classic game, reverse engineer the data formats and game rules and write an open source engine for it from scratch. Some games from 1990s are simple enough that we could have a playable prototype by the end of the week. Write which games you'd like to hack on in the comments. Don't forget to check e.g. on Open Source Game Clones, Github and SourceForge whether the game is ported already.

Project Description

Implement a checksum algorithm for BTRFS that uses and authenticated (keyed) hash. There are 2 cryptographically secure hashes supported by btrfs, sha256 and blake2b.