Intro

This article goes into detail about multiple areas of interest to contributors, which includes reviewers, developers, and integrators who each share an interest in guiding crosvm's direction.

Guidelines

The following is high level guidance for producing contributions to crosvm.

  • Prefer mechanism to policy.
  • Use existing protocols when they are adequate, such as virtio.
  • Prefer security over code re-use and speed of development.
  • Only the version of Rust in use by the Chrome OS toolchain is supported. This is ordinarily the stable version of Rust, but can be behind a version for a few weeks.
  • Avoid distribution specific code.

Code Health

Scripts

In the bin/ directory of the crosvm repository, there is the clippy script which lints the Rust code and the fmt script which will format the crosvm Rust code inplace.

Running tests

The ./test_all script will use docker containers to run all tests for crosvm.

For more details on using the docker containers for running tests locally, including faster, iterative test runs, see ci/README.md.

Submitting Code

See also, Chrome OS Contributing Guide

Once your change is reviewed by a crosvm owner it will need to go through two layers of presubmit checks.

The review will trigger Kokoro to run crosvm specific tests. If you want to check kokoro results before a review, you can set 'Commit Queue +1' in gerrit to trigger a dry-run.

If you upload further changes after the you were given 'Code Review +2', Kokoro will automatically trigger another test run. But you can also always comment 'kokoro rerun' to manually trigger another build if needed.

When Kokoro passes, it will set Verified +1 and the change is ready to be sent to the ChromeOS commit queue by setting CQ+2.

Note: This is different from other ChromeOS repositories, where Verified +1 bit is set by the developers to indicate that they successfully tested a change. The Verified bit can only be set by Kokoro in the crosvm repository.

The commit queue will test your change on ChromeOS hardware, including high level end-to-end tests. Only if all of those pass, will the change be submitted.

Failures here will cause the commit queue to reject the change until it is re-added (CQ+2). Unfortunately, it is extremely common for false negatives to cause a change to get rejected, so be ready to re-apply the CQ+2 label if you're the owner of a ready to submit change.

Style guidelines

To format all code, crosvm defers to rustfmt. In addition, the code adheres to the following rules:

The use statements for each module should be grouped in this order

  1. std
  2. third-party crates
  3. chrome os crates
  4. crosvm crates
  5. crate

crosvm uses the remain crate to keep error enums sorted, along with the #[sorted] attribute to keep their corresponding match statements in the same order.