IBM/GNOME: fwupd, debuginfod-enabled Sysprof, and Spotify Controls GNOME Extension

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 12, 2024

• GNOME ☛ Richard Hughes: Making it easy to generate fwupd device emulation data

  We’re trying to increase the fwupd coverage score, so we can mercilessly refactor and improve code upstream without risks of regressions. To do this we run thousands of unit tests for each part of the libfwupd public API and libfwupdplugin private API. This gets us a long way, but what we really want to do is emulate the end-to-end firmware update of every real device we support.

  It’s not trivial (or quick) connecting hundreds of devices to a specific CI machine, and so for some time we’ve supported recording USB device enumeration, re-plug, firmware write, re–re-plug and re-enumeration. For fwupd 2.0.0 we added support for all sysfs-based devices too, which allows us emulate a real world NVMe disk doing actual ioctls() and reads() in every submitted CI job. We’re now going to ask vendors to record emulations for existing plugins of the firmware update so we can run those in CI too.

• GNOME ☛ Christian Hergert: debuginfod-enabled Sysprof

  Based on some initial work by Barnabás Pőcze Sysprof gained support for symbolizing stack traces using debuginfod.

  If you don’t want to install debuginfo packages for your entire system but still want really useful function names, this is for you. The system-configured debuginfod servers will provide you access to those debuginfo-enabled ELF binaries so that we can discover the appropriate symbol names.

• OMG Ubuntu ☛ Spotify Controls GNOME Extension is Ideal for Music Addicts

  GNOME Shell shows now playing info in the notification shade, out of view but there when you want to check in. Most users like this approach, but perhaps you don’t? Personally, I do like seeing media info (album art, artist name, track title) in the top bar. If I listen to a playlist like Spotify Discover I can see which song/artist is playing by looking at the top of the screen.