Feed cleverhans-blog [copy] http://www.cleverhans.io/feed.xml has loading error: cURL error 22: The requested URL returned error: 404
GNOME OS' prêt-à-booter image (asg2025)
GNOME OS is a distribution based around systemd-sysupdate. This year, we finally created a live installer image using the same /usr partition as the installed OS. The main innovation however is the ability to install without the need to reboot. The user can start working while the installation is happening.
This live image is built using systemd-repart. And the installer itself also uses systemd-repart. But systemd-repart is not the complete solution and we had to solve some challenges.
Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/de/
about this event: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/all-systems-go-2025/talk/QRJVL3/
Video:asg2025-352-eng-GNOME_OS_pret-a-booter_image_hd.mp4
Slim device software with systemd targets and nspawn (asg2025)
It has been 10 years since Axis Communications had a presentation at the systemd conference. Back then, we have shown how we have increased our product quality, stability and boot times by porting our platform to systemd. 10 years later, we had different challenges to keep the resource usages and boot times under control. We have started from bottom up and sliced our software for this purpose. This work also got us inspired to create virtual versions of our hardware products that we cluster deploy using systemd's nspawn. We have hundreds of engineers working on...
Forget zbus, zlink is the future of IPC in Rust (asg2025)
Last year, Lennart Poettering of the systemd fame, [gave a presentation](https://media.ccc.de/v/all-systems-go-2024-276-varlink-now-) at this very same conference, where he introduced Varlink, a modern yet simple IPC mechanism. He presented a case for Varlink, rather than [D-Bus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Bus) to be the future of Inter-process communication on Linux. As someone who works on D-Bus, I took upon myself to prove him wrong, only to find out that I achieved exactly the opposite. It didn't take long before I got convinced of his vision. Since I was largely responsible for giving the world [an easy to use D-Bus Rust library](https://crates.io/crates/zbus),...
Introducing ue-rs, minimal and secure rewrite of update engine in Flatcar (asg2025)
Introduce ue-rs, a fresh project that aims to be a drop-in reimplementation of update engine, written in Rust. The goal of ue-rs is to have a minimal, secure and robust implementation of update engine, required by A/B update mechanism of Flatcar Container Linux. Just like the existing update engine, it downloads OS update payloads from a Nebraska server, parses its Omaha protocol, verifies signatures, etc. This project, however, is different from the original update engine in the following aspects. First, it aims to be minimal, by reducing heavyweight legacies in the update engine. Moreover, written...
CentOS Proposed Updates: Bridging the Gap between development and production (asg2025)
CentOS Stream is especially suited for production deployments. In these environments it's often common to develop improvements to distribution packages and want to contribute them upstream. Unfortunately, until very recently that required one to then maintain their own build and deployment pipeline for the packages, at least until the changes made their way into the distribution. CentOS Proposed Updates (CPU) SIG aims to bridge this gap - changes that have been submitted as merge requests can be built in this SIG, providing those who run Stream in production with access to needed updates while they...
One Boot Config to Rule Them All: Bringing UAPI Boot Specification to Legacy BIOS (asg2025)
The UAPI Boot Loader Specification defines conventions that let multiple operating systems and bootloaders share boot config files. So far, only systemd-boot implements it - and it’s UEFI-only by design. As a result, hybrid UEFI/BIOS images require maintaining (and keeping in sync) two sets of bootloader configs: one for systemd-boot, and one for a legacy bootloader such as syslinux. I set out to fix that by building a BIOS bootloader that uses the UAPI Boot Loader Specification - allowing both UEFI and legacy boot to use a single shared set of config files. This talk is...
Dirlock: a new tool to manage encrypted filesystems (asg2025)
In the Linux world there are several tools and technologies to encrypt data on a hard drive, most falling into one of two categories: block device encryption (like LUKS) or stacked filesystem encryption (like EncFs or gocryptfs). This presentation will introduce Dirlock, a new tool that belongs to a third category: native filesystem encryption, using the kernel's fscrypt API. Dirlock is currently being developed and its aim is to provide a flexible way to encrypt files, suitable for both user accounts and arbitrary directories, with full PAM integration, support for hardware-backed mechanisms such as...
Leveraging bootable OCI images in Fedora CoreOS and RHEL CoreOS (asg2025)
In last year's ASG!, bootc and bootable containers were introduced. In this talk, we'll go over what changed since last year, and how Fedora CoreOS and RHEL CoreOS are leveraging bootable containers to reduce maintenance and increase sharing.
Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/de/
about this event: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/all-systems-go-2025/talk/87TFB7/
Video:asg2025-375-eng-Leveraging_bootable_OCI_images_in_Fedora_CoreOS_and_RHEL_CoreOS_hd.mp4
Modernizing GNOME (asg2025)
GNOME has collected some very old code over the years. During the recent GNOME 49 release, we've made some drastic cleanups. Most visibly, we've dropped support for X11 and gained many dependencies on systemd. Let's explore some of the what and why for these changes!
Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/de/
about this event: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/all-systems-go-2025/talk/FQE7QZ/
Video:asg2025-364-eng-Modernizing_GNOME_hd.mp4
New Linux Kernel Coredump Infrastructure (asg2025)
Coredumping on Linux has long been a nightmare. Currently two modes are supported: (1) Dumping directly into a file somewhere on the filesystem. (2) Dumping into a pipe connected to a usermode helper process spawned as a child of the system_unbound_wq or kthreadd. For simplicity I'm mostly ignoring (1). There's probably still some users of (1) out there but processing coredumps in this way can be considered adventurous especially in the face of set*id binaries. The most common option should be (2) by now. It works by allowing userspace to put a string into /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern like: ...