I’ve been a pretty lax blogger of late, well always, but nowadays I have a lot more interesting stuff to blog about and seemingly even less time to do it.
The reason I’m breaking with tradition is that I spent last week at the Linux Plumbers Conference and Kristen Carlson Accardi, the conference organiser, requested that if we enjoyed it we blog about it. Well I loved it!
The plumbing of Linux is the part I am most interested in; the kernel, libraries and low level programming. The conference was great and had an interesting mix of tracks. I didn’t manage to attend all the talks I wanted, such as the btrfs talk and the unscheduled talk on moving D-bus into the kernel (awesome idea), however I did see some fantastic talks and got to witness some fruitful discussions.
The ‘Boot and Init’ track was excellent. Arjan and Auke’s “From Naught to Sixty in 5 Seconds” talk stirred up plenty of discussion and lead to distro developers having a reduce-boot-time hack-fest. I can’t wait to get ahold of Arjan’s super readahead kernel patches and see what we can do with them. Dave Jones’ talk about initrd’s and a unified, upstream mkinitrd, while less explosive, was also good for the discussions it nurtured including ideas of trying to do away with initrd’s for the high percentage of users who run the most common hardware (by compiling the most common drivers into the kernel) and the talks main proposal of having an upstream and unified mkinitrd.
The ‘Kernel Debugging and Tracing’ track was very interesting; I particularly enjoyed the discussion of a unified buffer for the various tracing mechanisms. To the conferences credit such a feature was announced at the end of the LPC and is in active discussion on the LKML.
The rest of the tracks I attended where also really interesting but the two mentioned where the ones that really did it for me and where my main reason for wanting to be there; the wannabe academic in me regrets missing the two talks mentioned above but I pragmatically attended the tracks most useful to my work with Poky and don’t regret that one bit.
I can’t wait for the return of the conference next year and fully intend to go; I’m especiailly looking forward to being able to get more involved in some of the discussions! Portland is a cool city and I’m not at all upset the LPC will be there again next year.
Great work by the whole LPC team and big thanks to those who made it possible for me to attend and everyone who I got to hang out with in Portland – really awesome week!