Meeting minutes (Sat 8 May 2021)

Meeting minutes (Sat 8 May 2021)

[Robin Randhawa]

Hi folks.

Summarised meeting minutes (Saturday 8th May 2021)
--------------------------------------------------

News
----

* "Good-first-issue" tag added to current issues. We got a contributor as a 
   result!

* A question came up: What fields do we need in the module macro ? Some mods 
   made to the macro as a result.

* Rustdoc feature that is used by the project is now stabilised in Rust. Also 
   @argfile.

* RISC-V support added to CI.

* Thanks to Finn and others, we can now use rust-analyzer for all the crates 
   used by the kernel and dependencies.

* Improved nixOS support.

* Driver contribution: Dummy network driver, contributed by Finn.

* Driver contribution: RNG driver for use on RPi, contributed by Sven.

General comments
----------------

* As discussed previously, there shall now be 2 meetings moving forwards. One 
   every alternate Saturday and another one during the working week. 
   
   The former is for a free form, informal, general catch-up. The latter is a 
   technically focused one. 
   
   Apart from these 2 meetings, if anyone has any pressing matters to discuss, 
   please send an email out to the list and folks can decide if they want to meet 
   to discuss. 
   
   For all meets, please try and share an agenda ahead of time so folks can prep 
   accordingly.

* Generally speaking, PRs should be the way to go for any code that needs 
   discussing.

* When using qemu note that most distros as of now do not have a sufficiently 
   new one. Eg Working with RISC-V will need qemu v6. 

Questions and Answers
---------------------

Q Should wrapper structs use repr(transparent) ?

- No

Q Should everything that wraps a pointer implement the PointerWrapper Trait ?

- If there is an intent to pass a pointer from Rust -> C and then back, that’s 
   where the trait is used.

- There is a DenyList feature in bindgen that can be used to deal with 
   problematic structs. Also OpaqueList. 

Q Can we not use cargo ? It would help with dependency management etc.

- No. Reasons enumerated here: https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/pull/52.  
   Cargo has a bunch of problems that need resolving (output interleaving with 
   Makefiles, cargo workspace issues).

Q Why are we using Cstrings that are different from the std lib ?

- Because they need to be null terminated. Alternative strategies that guarantee 
   null termination welcome.

Q What about the previously discussed use of the Zulip chat platform ?

- Not done yet. Should happen shortly. ** Action: Miguel **

Cheers,
Robin

Re: Meeting minutes (Sat 8 May 2021)

[Miguel Ojeda]

Hi Robin,

Thanks a lot for doing this!

A couple notes inline.

On Sat, May 8, 2021 at 10:24 PM Robin Randhawa <robin.randhawa@arm.com> wrote:
>
> * As discussed previously, there shall now be 2 meetings moving forwards. One
>    every alternate Saturday and another one during the working week.

The 18:00 UTC will be monthly, first Saturday of each month -- I just
sent the recurring invitation to all folks that came to previous ones.

If folks from eastern timezones are interested, we can have another
one at e.g. 10:00 UTC on the third Saturday of each month. Please let
us know you are interested!

(We decided monthly for the informal one because we will now have the
technical ones too, plus possibly the alternate informal one, so we
didn't want to put people through a lot of meetings :)

> * Generally speaking, PRs should be the way to go for any code that needs
>    discussing.

In general, having the "code in front of us" helps for those kinds of
discussions.

So opening an issue (for bugs, missing things, etc.) or a PR (if it is
an actual proposed change) helps with that and allows for code to be
referenced etc. Also, feel free to send an email to the mailing list
if it a more general topic, even if it is code-related.

In the technical meetings we can also share the screen etc. as needed.

> * When using qemu note that most distros as of now do not have a sufficiently
>    new one. Eg Working with RISC-V will need qemu v6.

The pre-built ones we use in the CI are here in case it helps someone:

    https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/ci-bin

Cheers,
Miguel

Re: Meeting minutes (Sat 8 May 2021)

[Leandro Coutinho]

On Sat, May 8, 2021 at 5:24 PM Robin Randhawa <robin.randhawa@arm.com> wrote:
>
> Hi folks.
>
> Summarised meeting minutes (Saturday 8th May 2021)
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> News
> ----
>

Hi!

It would be nice if these meetings were recorded and then shared on YouTube.

The Rust Team does this, eg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3DbJGVWeoQ

Re: Meeting minutes (Sat 8 May 2021)

[Wei Liu]

On Sat, May 08, 2021 at 09:22:58PM +0100, Robin Randhawa wrote:
[...]
> Q What about the previously discussed use of the Zulip chat platform ?
> 
> - Not done yet. Should happen shortly. ** Action: Miguel **

Look forward to having Zulip. Emails and calls are too heavy weight for
quick questions and discussions.

Wei.

> 
> Cheers,
> Robin