Firecracker is running serverless workloads at scale within AWS, but it's still day 1 on the journey guided by our mission. There's a lot more to build and we welcome all contributions.
There's a lot to contribute to in Firecracker. We've opened issues for all the features we want to build and improvements we want to make. Good first issues are labeled accordingly. We're also keen to hearing about your use cases and how we can support them, your ideas, and your feedback for what's already here.
If you're just looking for quick feedback for an idea or proposal, open an issue or chat with us on the Firecracker Slack workgroup.
Follow the contribution workflow for submitting your changes to the Firecracker codebase. If you want to receive high-level but still commit-based feedback for a contribution, follow the request for comments steps instead.
Firecracker uses the “fork-and-pull” development model. Follow these steps if you want to merge your changes to Firecracker:
- Within your fork of Firecracker, create a branch for your contribution. Use a meaningful name.
- Create your contribution, meeting all contribution quality standards
- Create a pull request against the main branch of the Firecracker repository.
- Add two reviewers to your pull request (a maintainer will do that for you if you're new). Work with your reviewers to address any comments and obtain a minimum of 2 approvals from maintainers. To update your pull request, amend existing commits whenever applicable. Then force-push the new changes to your pull request branch. Address all review comments you receive.
- Once the pull request is approved, one of the maintainers will merge it.
If you just want to receive feedback for a contribution proposal, open an “RFC” (“Request for Comments”) pull request:
- On your fork of Firecracker, create a branch for the contribution you want feedback on. Use a meaningful name.
- Create your proposal based on the existing codebase.
- Create a pull request
against the main branch of the Firecracker repository. Prefix your pull
request name with
[RFC]
. - Discuss your proposal with the community on the pull request page (or on any other channel). Add the conclusion(s) of this discussion to the pull request page.
Most quality and style standards are enforced automatically during integration testing. For ease of use you can setup a git pre-commit hook by running the following in the Firecracker root directory:
cargo install rusty-hook
rusty-hook init
This project also has linters for Python and Markdown. These will be called by the pre-commit when you modify any Python and Markdown files. In order to make sure you are setup we recommend you install poetry and pyenv.
Poetry is used by this project and pyenv will help you make sure you have a
Python version compatible with the poetry python project we use as part of
./tools/devctr
.
Once you have these two installed you can run the following to install the dev container poetry project:
poetry -C ./tools/devctr install --no-root
Then, you can activate the poetry virtual environment by running:
poetry shell -C ./tools/devctr
Which you will need to do after modifying python or markdown files so that the pre-commit can finish successfully.
Your contribution needs to meet the following standards:
-
Separate each logical change into its own commit.
-
Each commit must pass all unit & code style tests, and the full pull request must pass all integration tests. See tests/README.md for information on how to run tests.
-
Unit test coverage must increase the overall project code coverage.
-
Include integration tests for any new functionality in your pull request.
-
Document all your public functions.
-
Add a descriptive message for each commit. Follow commit message best practices.
-
A good commit message may look like
A descriptive title of 72 characters or fewer A concise description where each line is 72 characters or fewer. Signed-off-by: <A full name> <A email> Co-authored-by: <B full name> <B email>
-
Usage of
unsafe
is heavily discouraged. Ifunsafe
is required, it should be accompanied by a comment detailing its...- Justification, potentially including quantifiable reasons why safe alternatives were not used (e.g. via a benchmark showing a valuable1 performance improvements).
- Safety, as per
clippy::undocumented_unsafe_blocks
. This comment must list all invariants of the called function, and explain why there are upheld. If relevant, it must also prove that undefined behavior is not possible.
E.g.
// Test creating a resource. // JUSTIFICATION: This cannot be accomplished without unsafe as // `external_function()` returns `RawFd`. An alternative here still uses // unsafe e.g. `drop(unsafe { OwnedFd::from_raw_fd(external_function()) });`. // SAFETY: `external_function()` returns a valid file descriptor. unsafe { libc::close(external_function()); }
-
Avoid using
Option::unwrap
/Result::unwrap
. Prefer propagating errors instead of aborting execution, or usingOption::expect
/Result::except
if no alternative exists. Leave a comment explaining why the code will not panic in practice. Often,unwrap
s are used because a previous check ensures they are safe, e.g.let my_value: u32 = ...; if my_value <= u16::MAX { Ok(my_value.try_into::<u16>().unwrap()) } else { Err(Error::Overflow) }
These can often be rewritten using
.map
/.map_err
ormatch
/if let
constructs such asmy_value.try_into::<u16>() .map_err(|_| Error::Overflow)
See also this PR for a lot of examples.
-
Document your pull requests. Include the reasoning behind each change, and the testing done.
-
Acknowledge Firecracker's Apache 2.0 license and certify that no part of your contribution contravenes this license by signing off on all your commits with
git -s
. Ensure that every file in your pull request has a header referring to the repository license file.
Firecracker is an open source product released under the Apache 2.0 license.
We respect intellectual property rights of others and we want to make sure all incoming contributions are correctly attributed and licensed. A Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) is a lightweight mechanism to do that.
The DCO is a declaration attached to every contribution made by every developer.
In the commit message of the contribution, the developer simply adds a
Signed-off-by
statement and thereby agrees to the DCO, which you can find
below or at DeveloperCertificate.org (http://developercertificate.org/).
Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1
By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:
(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
have the right to submit it under the open source license
indicated in the file; or
(b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the
best of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open
source license and I have the right under that license to
submit that work with modifications, whether created in whole
or in part by me, under the same open source license (unless
I am permitted to submit under a different license), as
Indicated in the file; or
(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified
it.
(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution
are public and that a record of the contribution (including
all personal information I submit with it, including my
sign-off) is maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed
consistent with this project or the open source license(s)
involved.
We require that every contribution to Firecracker is signed with a Developer Certificate of Origin. DCO checks are enabled via https://github.com/apps/dco, and your PR will fail CI without it.
Additionally, we kindly ask you to use your real name. We do not accept anonymous contributors, nor those utilizing pseudonyms. Each commit must include a DCO which looks like this:
Signed-off-by: Jane Smith <jane.smith@email.com>
You may type this line on your own when writing your commit messages. However,
if your user.name
and user.email
are set in your git config, you can use
-s
or --signoff
to add the Signed-off-by
line to the end of the commit
message automatically.
Forgot to add DCO to a commit? Amend it with git commit --amend -s
.
Footnotes
-
Performance improvements in non-hot paths are unlikely to be considered valuable. ↩