Contributing to Gramine

Işıl Öz

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Jun 30, 2022, 5:57:43 PM6/30/22

to us...@gramineproject.io

Hi,

I am a mentee in a project LFX mentorship program. We are looking for a project to that I can contribute. Based on my background and interest, we thought that Gramine is a very good fit. Specifically, I am interested in the Communication with devices issue. Since I am interested in GPU architectures, I want to contribute to this. I have officially 6 months on the project, but I want to continue as needed.

While I have a background in computer architecture and low-level programming, I don't have any experience in open-source project development. The security issues are also new for me, I have a background in fault tolerance and reliability. I want to merge those two topics in my future research.

Currently, I am trying to read the Gramine documents and build/read the code. I am also reading the related paper "Computation offloading to hardware accelerators in Intel SGX and Gramine Library OS".

Do you think I can work on that issue? And can you help me with how to start/continue?

Thanks in advance,

Işıl

Wojtek Porczyk

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Jul 1, 2022, 5:23:55 AM7/1/22

to Işıl Öz, us...@gramineproject.io

On Fri, Jul 01, 2022 at 12:54:09AM +0300, 'Işıl Öz' via Gramine Users wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am a mentee in a project LFX mentorship program

> <https://mentorship.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/project/7da32609-7541-44ce-9534-804cad2ff219>.

> We are looking for a project to that I can contribute. Based on my
> background and interest, we thought that Gramine is a very good fit.
> Specifically, I am interested in the Communication with devices

> <https://github.com/gramineproject/gramine/issues/353> issue. Since I am

> interested in GPU architectures, I want to contribute to this. I have
> officially 6 months on the project, but I want to continue as needed.
>
> While I have a background in computer architecture and low-level
> programming, I don't have any experience in open-source project development.
> The security issues are also new for me, I have a background in fault
> tolerance and reliability. I want to merge those two topics in my future
> research.
>
> Currently, I am trying to read the Gramine documents and build/read the
> code. I am also reading the related paper "Computation offloading to
> hardware accelerators in Intel SGX and Gramine Library OS".
>
> Do you think I can work on that issue? And can you help me with how to
> start/continue?
>
> Thanks in advance,

Hi, Işıl,

Thanks for contacting us. Currently we aren't set up for mentoring volunteers,
so we'll have to talk about your application on Monday on maintainers meeting,
and we'll answer on Monday evening or on Tuesday.
(Agenda: https://github.com/gramineproject/gramine/discussions/716).

Ticket #353 is more like RFC, and to start implementing it would require some
agreement on a proposed solution/architecture, so it's not something that you
can start working on right now, though if you have some comments about issues
raised there, you're more than welcome to take part in the discussion.

Since you mentioned you have no experience in free software development, I'd
suggest you start with a small PR to understand our workflow. For example, our
SGX glossary [1] is, shall I say, unfinished, so if you care to contribute
some of your notes, which you might have taken while reading the related
paper you've mentioned, we'll be grateful to review your PR.

[1] https://gramine.readthedocs.io/en/latest/sgx-intro.html
source: https://github.com/gramineproject/gramine/blob/master/Documentation/sgx-intro.rst

You can read more about our workflow here:
https://gramine.readthedocs.io/en/stable/devel/contributing.html

Also, we have longer "Onboarding" documentation with some reading references,
if you'd like to dive deeper:
https://gramine.readthedocs.io/en/stable/devel/onboarding.html

--
pozdrawiam / best regards
Wojtek Porczyk
Gramine / Invisible Things Lab

I do not fear computers,
I fear lack of them.
-- Isaac Asimov

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Wojtek Porczyk

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Jul 5, 2022, 5:57:06 PM7/5/22

to Işıl Öz, Elana Copperman, gramin...@googlegroups.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

Hi, Işıl,

[ I'm re-adding the group, it should be kept in Cc: when you're replying to
a message from a mailing list. ]

On Sat, Jul 02, 2022 at 02:26:34PM +0300, Işıl Öz wrote:
> Dear Wojtek,
>
> Thank you for your response.
>
> As you suggested, I will try to contribute the documentation by using my
> notes. I will also try to be involved in the discussion about the issue.
>
> I am looking forward to hearing your further suggestions. I would be very
> happy if you recommend a different issue or any other part I can contribute.

We've discussed this on maintainer's meeting[1] and concluded that while we
would, as always, gratefuly review and merge any contribution, no-one has time
to promise any commitment from the project maintainers during your work. We'll
obviously answer any technical questions on our public channels -- here on the
mailing list and/or on gitter, you can subscribe to both -- as time permits
(it mostly does), but for day to day guidance you'd have to rely on your LFX
mentor, who irrespective of her knowledge and credentials, is not a maintainer
of Gramine and can't make any decisions on behalf of the project, as we might
have different expectations about the code being reviewed.

If you'd like to work on Gramine, you'll have to find an area yourself and we
can't promise it would be merged before seeing the actual code. We also aren't
ready to assign you any existing issue (esp. a bigger one, IIUC we're talking
about tasks on the order of 6 months of work) to you before we see smaller
contributions, we can only tell you if someone already works on an issue. If
there's not an issue in our tracker, you can always write a RFC issue to ask
for comments.

(On a related note, I've also confirmed that issue #353 is already being
worked on by one of Intel's teams, so that particular issue would probably be
a poor choice.)

I'm sorry if that's not what you expected. If you still would like to
contribute to gramine, we're open to collaboration, but as I wrote, no
guarantees from us about anything.

[1] meeting notes are under agenda:
https://github.com/gramineproject/gramine/discussions/716

- --

pozdrawiam / best regards
Wojtek Porczyk
Gramine / Invisible Things Lab

I do not fear computers,
I fear lack of them.
-- Isaac Asimov

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