Re: G-Soc 2017

[Rafał Wojdyła]

On 2017-03-13 11:01, Soumyadeep Kundu wrote:
> Hello Sir,
Hello! I'm sorry for the late reply, I've been barely conscious this
week thanks to a bad case of flu.

> I am Soumyadeep Kundu, a second year undergrad pursuing Computer Science
> and Engineering at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.
> I am very much interested to contribute to QubesOS.
> I have already introduced myself in the mailing list. There I have been
> told to contact you.
> I am specially interested in :
> 1. Audio support for Qubes Windows Tool
> 2. Improve Windows GUI agent performance and stability.
> 3. GUI agent for Windows 8/10.
> All of these projects are under you.
> In the past few days, I was getting myself well acquainted with QubesOS.
> I was also learning about the Windows APIs, as it is a prerequisite for
> the projects.
> Can you please guide me in what should I do next, or if you can give me
> a starting task so that I can start with.
> Thanking You,
> Regards,
> Soumyadeep Kundu
>
I think 1) or 2) would be the easiest projects to try.

Investigating GUI agent performance would require knowing how Windows
windowing and input APIs work as well as how to operate a system
profiler. You can find the agent's code here:
https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-gui-agent-windows/tree/master
It has two main components: a custom video driver and a background
service. The driver manages display memory and provides the service with
address of the framebuffer (and notifies when a refresh occurs). The
service either maintains a list of application windows (in seamless
mode) or just a desktop window and sends this info to dom0. Service also
receives input events from dom0 and "replies" them in the Windows VM. I
think the last part (input simulation) is the main case of poor
performance, but you would need to double check this.

As for audio support, I think implementing a pulseaudio endpoint on
Windows and connecting it to dom0 would be your best bet. I don't know
the details on how the audio works for Linux VMs, but feel free to ask
on this mailing list if you want to know more. See this for Linux
implementation:
https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-gui-agent-linux/tree/master/pulse
I'm not sure how well pulseaudio runs on Windows so that would be the
first thing to check.

I hope that helps!

--
Best Regards,
Rafał Wojdyła
Invisible Things Lab

[Rafał Wojdyła]

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Best Regards,
Rafał Wojdyła
Invisible Things Lab

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[Rafał Wojdyła]

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On 2017-03-21 17:21, Soumyadeep Kundu wrote:
> Hello Sir, Thank you for your previous reply. It gave me the
> overall idea about the two projects. I was reading about
> pulse-audio, and there I noticed that there was a support for
> Windows via the MinGW toolchain (implementation of the GNU
> toolchain, which includes various tools such as GCC and binutils),
> but the Windows port has not been updated since 2011. Basically we
> have to give audio support in the Windows VM in QubesOS, and for
> that we have to make a pulseaudio endpoint in the Windows. The
> second project also seems interesting.
>
> What should I do next, should I continue studying about these 2
> topics or is any starting task which you can assign to me. Thanking
> you, Regards, Soumyadeep Kundu
>
I think you should try focusing on pulseaudio for Windows. See how
well (if at all) it works on Windows 7. If it does work, great! If it
doesn't, the first task would be to investigate why and fix it.

And, please keep the mailing list CC'd.

> On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 1:31 AM, Rafał Wojdyła
> <om...@invisiblethingslab.com <mailto:om...@invisiblethingslab.com>>

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