Hi!

Let me start this status update with an announcement: from 2023-08-28 to 2023-10-01 (!), I will be on leave, so I will have reduced availability. Don’t be surprised if I miss some e-mails, and feel free to ping me again (more generally, please do ping me if I forget about a discussion — that also tends to happen when I’m not on leave). During that time, I will be traveling to Korea and Japan. If you live there and want to say hello, please reach out! :)

This month, Rose has continued working on wlroots frame scheduling. After a fair amount of discussion, she’s found a pretty nice API design. She still needs to address and cleanup a few things, but that merge request is on a good track! I’ve also merged a new API to embed a compositor inside a Wayland client, and sent patches to remove some cases where we were waiting for a reply from Xwayland in a blocking fashion.

My kernel patch for signaling an eventfd from a drm_syncobj has been merged (see last month’s post for more details), and I’ve reviewed a patch from Erik Kurzinger to import a sync_file into a drm_syncobj timeline, which was possible before but awkward (it required 3 IOCTLs and a temporary binary drm_syncobj). As usual, I’ve sent a few kernel documentation patches as well.

I’ve released a new version of Cage, the Wayland kiosk compositor. Cage now uses the latest wlroots release, implements a bunch of new protocols and leverages wlroots’ scene-graph API.

The NPotM is go-mls, a Go library for the Messaging Layer Security protocol. It’s a shiny new end-to-end encryption framework for messaging protocols (similar to the one used by e.g. Signal and Matrix). I wanted to figure out how it works, but simply reading a 132-page RFC didn’t seem fun enough, so I just tried implementing it instead. I’m passing most of the official test vectors, still missing a few things but overall not too far away from a proper implementation. I’ve been discussing with a few folks about an IRCv3 extension for MLS, but we’re still at the very early stages on that front.

Speaking of IRCv3, the pre-away extension has been merged, so the away status of soju users shouldn’t blink anymore when the Goguma mobile client synchronizes in the background. I’ve also submitted the no-implicit-names extension for standardization. That extension reduces bandwidth usage for clients who don’t need to always maintain a list of all users in all channels. This helps a lot with slow 3G connections in the countryside.

The SNPotM is libdns/dnsupdate, a Go library for the venerable dynamic DNS UPDATE protocol implemented by various authoritative name servers. The library conforms to an interface shared with other (proprietary) libdns providers. I have more plans in this area, but will keep that for a future blog post.

I’ve sent a go-proxyproto patch to add a helper to configure an HTTP/2 server with PROXY protocol upgrade support. TLS ALPN is needed to negotiate HTTP/2, so it’s tricky to make work behind a reverse proxy which terminates the TLS connection. This patch is basically part of kimchi ripped off and put behind a nice API. This patch would be useful to add HTTP/2 support to pages.sr.ht.

Last but not least, I’ve implemented tracker export for the todo.sr.ht GraphQL API. delthas has added support for that in hut. Next up is support for import in hut! I’ve also sent a whole bunch of bug fixes for sr.ht.

That’s all for this month! I’m not sure I’ll write a status update in September, but will definitely do so in October.