The topic of persistent memory is back to the future for those of us old enough to have used core memory, but today’s persistent memory boasts densities, speeds, latencies, and capacities that are well beyond the scope even of science fiction back in the core-memory era.
However, with extreme densities, speeds, latencies, and capacities come interesting technical challenges. This microconference will therefore cover the “struct page” problem, performance hotspots in both kernel and userspace I/O fastpaths, managing access mechanisms such as DAX, providing atomic sector updates, and more.
For more information on this topic, see the wiki page.
We hope to see you there!
Core counts keep rising, and that means that the Linux kernel continues to encounter interesting performance and scalability issues. Which is not a bad thing, since it has been well over ten years since the “free lunch” of exponential CPU-clock frequency increases came to an abrupt end. This microconference will therefore look at futex scaling, address-space scaling, improvements to queued spinlocks, additional lockless algorithms, userspace per-CPU critical sections, and much else besides.
For more information on this topic, please see the wiki page.
In the past, this has been called the Network Virtualization Microconference, but this year’s instance is branching out to include IPv6 and Security.
Network-virtualization topics include networking for multi-tenant container clusters, reducing network-namespace load on the system, intelligent processing at the edge of the data center, programmable datapath (as in fun with eBPF, OVS, nft, and much else besides), hardware support, and protocol development.
IPv6 topics include performance (can it catch up to IPv4?), consolidation of common IPv4/IPv6 functionality, solving the IPv6 datacenter addressing problem, and providing network virtualization without encapsulation using logical IPv6 overlays.
Security topics include scalable networking security policies for containers, securing applications in multi-host data centers, encryption of overlays, and hardware support.
It appears that coordinated work in all three of these areas is required to make good progess. For more information, see the wiki page.
We have decided to extend the Early Bird rate through June 5th 2015, to match LinuxCon North America’s dates and to allow more time for people to register, after authors notifications and schedule announcements. The regular rate will now start on June 6th.
Somewhere along the way, the deadline for notifications to Authors of the Shared LinuxCon/Plumbers track got pushed out by a week to 25 May. In the light of that, we’re extending the deadline for Earlybird registration to Friday 29 May to allow anyone who doesn’t get a talk accepted but who still wishes to attend Plumbers to take advantage of the Earlybird registration rate.
The deadline for submission of the refereed talks is now Tuesday, May 12, 2105. The Authors Notification date has been moved to May 26th. Get your proposals in! See details on the Participate page.
There have been more than a few spirited discussions on the topic of device trees (described here) over the past few years, and we can probably expect a few more at this year’s Device Tree microconference. The main focus is on programs, scripts, techniques, and core support to help create correct device trees, validate existing device trees, and support troubleshooting of incorrect device trees, drivers, and subsystems. Within that area of focus, topics span the range from inspection to verification/validation to bindings to documentation. This microconference will also examine the impact of overlays, including boot-time and runtime updates to device trees.
This microconference will cover all things LLVM related to Linux. Discussions will range from progress in compiling the Linux kernel (and changes in clang/LLVM) to support of clang in yocto, and even to compiling an entire distro with clang (while also using the “musl” replacement for glibc and uclibc). The topics will also include LLVM being used for bug hunting and for the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF). More topics and speakers will of course be added. If you have an LLVM-related discussion you would like to lead up, please contact Behan Webster <behanw@converseincode.com>.
As with 2014 and several years prior, 2015 is the year of the Linux smartphone. There are a number of mobile/embedded environments based on the Linux kernel, the most prominent of course being Android. One consequence of this prominence is a variety of projects derived from Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which raises the question of how best to manage them, and additionally if it is possible to run a single binary image of the various software components across a variety of devices. In addition, although good progress has been made upstreaming various Android patches, there is more work to be done for ADF, KMS, and Sync, among others. Migrating from Binder to KDBus is still a challenge, as are a number of other candidates for removal from drivers/staging. There are also issues remaining with ION, cenalloc, and DMA API. Finally, power management is still in need of improvement, with per-process power management being a case in point.
So when is the year of the Linux desktop? It seems that these developers are too busy working on mobile devices to have time to ask that question!
We hope to see you there!
March 29, 2015 – 12:37 pm
In a departure from prior Plumbers tradition, we are pleased to announce not a Development Tools Microconference, but rather a set of Development Tools tutorials, including interactive tutorials, demos, and short presentations. Topics include Coccinelle (Julia Lawall), testing and debugging tools (Shuah Khan), issues with copying and pasting Linux kernel code (Michael Godfrey), and LLVM/clang and the Linux kernel (Behan Webster).
Given how important tools are to productivity of developers and the quality of their code, the time devoted to these tutorials promises to be time well spent!
Come and find out how to use the tools you have heard about! We hope to see you there!
