The Ubuntu Developer Summit was held in Copenhagen last week, to discuss plans for the next six-month cycle of Ubuntu. This was the most productive UDS that I've been to — maybe it was the shorter four-day schedule, or the overlap with Linaro Connect, but it sure felt like a whirlwind of activity.

I thought I'd share some details about some of the sessions that cover areas I'm working on at the moment. In no particular order:

Improving cross-compilation

Blueprint: foundations-r-improve-cross-compilation

This plan is a part of a mutli-cycle effort to improve cross-compilation support in Ubuntu. Progress is generally going well — the consensus from the session was that the components are fairly close to complete, but we still need some work to pull those parts together into something usable.

So, this cycle we'll be working on getting that done. While we have a few bugfixes and infrastructure updates to do, one significant part of this cycle’s work will be to document the “best-practices” for cross builds in Ubuntu, on wiki.ubuntu.com. This process will be heavily based on existing pages on the Linaro wiki. Because most of the support for cross-building is already done, the actual process for cross-building should be fairly straightforward, but needs to be defined somewhere.

I'll post an update when we have a working draft on the Ubuntu wiki, stay tuned for details.

Rapid archive bringup for new hardware

Blueprint: foundations-r-rapid-archive-bringup

I'd really like for there to be a way to get an Ubuntu archive built “from scratch”, to enable custom toolchain/libc/other system components to be built and tested. This is typically useful when bringing up new hardware, or testing rebuilds with new compiler settings. Because we may be dealing with new hardware, doing this bootstrap through cross-compilation is something we'd like too.

Eventually, it would be great to have something as straightforward as the OpenEmbedded or OpenWRT build process to construct a repository with a core set of Ubuntu packages (say, minbase), for previously-unsupported hardware.

The archive bootstrap process isn't done often, and can require a large amount of manual intervention. At present, there's only a couple of folks who know how to get it working. The plan here is to document the bootstrap process in this cycle, so that others can replicate the process, and possibly improve the bits that are a little too janky for general consumption.

ARM64 / ARMv8 / aarch64 support

Blueprint: foundations-r-aarch64

This session is an update for progress on the support for ARMv8 processors in Ubuntu. While no general-purpose hardware exists at the moment, we want to have all the pieces ready for when we start seeing initial implementations. Because we don't have hardware yet, this work has to be done in a cross-build environment; another reason to keep on with the foundations-r-improve-cross-compilation plan!

So far, toolchain progress is going well, with initial cross toolchains available for quantal.

Although kernel support isn’t urgent at the moment, we’ll be building an initial kernel-headers package for aarch64. There's also a plan to get a page listing the aarch64-cross build status of core packages, so we'll know what is blocked for 64-bit ARM enablement.

We’ve also got a bunch of workitems for volunteers to fix cross-build issues as they arise. If you're interested, add a workitem in the blueprint, and keep an eye on it for updates.

Secure boot support in Ubuntu

Blueprint: foundations-r-secure-boot

This session covered progress of secure boot support as at the 12.10 Quantal Quetzal release, items that are planned for 13.04, and backports for 12.04.2.

As for 12.10, we’ve got the significant components of secure boot support into the release — the signed boot chain. The one part that hasn't hit 12.10 yet is the certificate management & update infrastructure, but that is planned to reach 12.10 by way of a not-too-distant-future update.

The foundations team also mentioned that they were starting the 12.04.2 backport right after UDS, which will bring secure boot support to our current “Long Term Support” (LTS) release. Since the LTS release is often preferred Ubuntu preinstall situations, this may be used as a base for hardware enablement on secure boot machines. Combined with the certificate management tools (described at sbkeysync & maintaining uefi key databases), and the requirement for “custom mode” in general-purpose hardware, this will allow for user-defined trust configuration in an LTS release.

As for 13.04, we're planning to update the shim package to a more recent version, which will have Matthew Garrett's work on the Machine Owner Key plan from SuSE.

We're also planning to figure out support for signed kernel modules, for users who wish to verify all kernel-level code. Of course, this will mean some changes to things like DKMS, which run custom module builds outside of the normal Ubuntu packages.

Netboot with secure boot is still in progress, and will require some fixes to GRUB2.

And finally, the sbsigntools codebase could do with some new testcases, particularly for the PE/COFF parsing code. If you're interested in contributing, please contact me at jeremy.kerr@canonical.com.