Re: About Guix OS VM and Guix Package Management support request from Operating System developers

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org>]

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On Thu, 17 Oct 2024 21:18:16 +0200 (CEST)
wearefromuniverse--- via <help-guix@gnu.org> wrote:
> Hi,
Hi,

> For this we need to adapt Guix OS to replace fedora, the main
> operating system of Qubes OS. To run Guix OS inside VM Qubes we need
> a GNU Guix OS virtual machine. We need to ensure that this virtual
> machine can interact and communicate with other virtual machines and
> the host operating system through Xen technology, for which we need
> technical and software support from you.
[...]
> We also need open source volunteer developers to work on the software
> team. We are still a small community and we were founded 1 month ago.

The best way to do that would probably be to send patches directly to
Guix and to find people with commit access that are interested in
reviewing these patches.

As I understand Guix already has some Xen packages for instance,
but I've no idea how to use them. For instance the Guix manual doesn't
have anything at all on Xen. 

So finding out how to create a Guix VM compatible with Xen and/or
adding the missing support/documentation for Xen and sending relevant
patches to Guix (like to its cookbook or documentation) could be a good
start. It is also possible to add definitions for VMs inside the
Guix source code as well, and to reference that from the
manual/cookbook.

If you also need a fully free distribution that already supports
running Xen VMs easily, Trisquel 11 can probably do that.

I tried it personally on a ThinkPad X200 to understand if Xen worked
with a boot software distribution I co-maintain: I installed the
xen-system-amd64 and libvirt-daemon-driver-xen Trisquel packages and
rebooted and after that virt-manager could find the local Xen
hypervisor. I don't remember if I needed to add my user in some group
or not and I already had virt-manager and libvirt installed.

However I didn't go further as I lacked a Xen compatible VM to
completely validate that Xen worked for real.

Also note that I'm not a Guix maintainer. I'm just a user who also
contribute from time to time, and I also reuse Guix in other projects I
co-maintain / contribute to.

Denis.

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