CoWorking Meetup 1 Notes

CoWorking Meetup 1 Notes.md

• There was a tool request for a tool that takes metadata from recipies and shares them between repos and informs people about new versions of packages on (pkgsrc, oi-userland and omnios build tooling)
  • https://repology.org/
    • doesn’t notify maintainers
    • provides a view of which packages are out of date
  • Till has a prototype that will bump versions called “the forge” which will also add activitypub support for friendly forge formatted PR's to upstream activity pub
• Docs
  • priority is to guide new people into the process of contributing in various ways process
  • What do people need on terms of full tutorials?
• Two diverging versions of IPS (with OI and OmniOS), but only the differing zone brands are a problem.
  • Rust version is on the backburner - as it was figured out what the slow issue was in the sheer amount of userland incorporations built by the repo.
  • The work would mostly include git cherry-picking the commits from omnios into our repo and removing both brand directories after.
• Someone would like to see Xorg and Mesa updated to the latest
  • All of that except gfx-drm is userland packaging and a simple task. It's good for somebody to start and with some time.
  • At some point compilation might fail because https://github.com/OpenIndiana/gfx-drm is not exporting the correct kernel functions.
• Building packages guide: https://docs.openindiana.org/dev/userland/
• Developing drivers (book): https://illumos.org/books/wdd/bookinfo.html#bookinfo
  • ARM drivers might be the easiest to work on as they have a lot of TODO's in the code and simpe devices like serial ports etc not yet available.
  • Rust drivers
    • Oxide has some - illumos-gate repo at oxide should have some experiments
      • Network driver and network fastpath driver are written in rust, and can be compiled and run on OI, but the software itself is beta. However, these could be packages if people want to work on a Oxide@Home set of packages.
    • MaxPower experiment
    • official binding crate https://crates.io/crates/illumos/0.0.0 (Will need some push though)
    • use Rust no-std environment
    • use prepared kernel functions
    • write safe Rust functions as FFI to unsafe C kernel functions
    • lots and lots of bindgen.
    • Not much use for existing devs as it must integrate into existing kernel interfaces and existing devs have more training in C
• Might be good to incrementally update solaris docs to be OI-specific, and remove solaris docs from search (but still reference them)
  • Legacy consolidation could probably be deleted completely (done and merged)
• Oxide is based on upstream illumos-gate and omnios build recipies due to multiple reasons.
• KaOS is mentioned as a linux distro that might want to switch to illumos, but it is also mentioned this would likely be very difficult. It would be good to coordinate.
• For Rust dev on OI, https://helix-editor.com/ works and supports rust-analyzer and debugging