Summary of Survey Results – Thanks to all those who responded

Thank you to everyone who participated in the survey after Linux Plumbers in 2017,  we had 134 responses to it which, given the total number of conference participants of around 354, has provided confidence in the feedback trends.

Overall – 85% of respondents were positive about the event,  with only 2% actually saying they were dissatisfied.    Co-locating with Open Source Summit did not provide as much benefit as locating with the Kernel Summit in the past, so we will be co-locating with Kernel Summit in 2018.    This preference was also echoed in the write-in comments.   Conference participation was down from 2016,  but adding back the Kernel Summit colocation should address this.

On a positive note, the wireless woes of 2016 were resolved, and survey feedback indicated satisfaction in this area.   Also, folks have let us know that they were able to hear better in the rooms this time and follow the conversations – the throwable microphones were helpful here.  53% felt the conference size was about right, with 45% wanting more to be able to attend.

Communication – People generally approved of the communication from the committee (we didn’t spam you too much), and you were able to find the talks you wanted to attend.   The authors and miniconf leads that responded, followed the trend.

Venue – From the feedback,  we got the clear signal, that smaller venues like Santa Fe are preferred.   For 2018, Plumbers will be held in Vancouver, Canada,  where we’ll have a floor dedicated to us.    From your feedback,  we got wireless, power plug access, hacking space areas right this year, but had problems with on-site catering taking the break beverages and snacks away too soon.   The use of meal cards continues to be very popular, and the catering at the off-site events was well received and appreciated.

Events – The Closing Plenary was generally well received.  Some individuals didn’t find the lightning summaries at the closing that useful, but overall the survey feedback for those responding was either neutral or positive (less than 5% negative), similar to 2016.   We’re looking into the feasibility of some of the suggestions from the written comments to try to improve the closing summary further.   There were several compliments that came through on our evening events, and again the overall feedback provided was very positive.

Location –  Respondents were very positive about the convenience of having the hotel as the conference site,  and were able to use the negotiated rates.   They were more neutral about the choice of LA for the event (some liking it, some not).

Sessions – Of the sessions,  the hallway track continues to remain the most popular and well attended.   There was a very positive response to most of the miniconfs and talks; the refereed track running in parallel was popular.  Our experiment of using part of the time for an unconference was generally well received by those participating, but the write-in comments have some good suggestions for improving this.   Similarly making the schedule visible before the early registration closes is something that attendees want to see.   Keeping the focus on solving problems rather than presenting status is something we have improved on, and will continue to emphasize for next year.

There were lots of great suggestions in the “what one thing would you like to see changed”, and the program committee has been studying them to see what is possible to implement this year.    Thank you again to the participants for their input and help on making the Linux Plumbers Conference better in 2018 and the future.

Linux Plumbers Conference 2018 site and dates

We are pleased to announce that the 2018 edition of the Linux Plumbers Conference will take place in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre. It will be colocated with the Linux Kernel Summit. LPC will run from November 13, 2018 (Tuesday) to November 15, 2018 (Thursday).

We look forward to another great edition of LPC and to seeing you all in Vancouver!

Stay tuned for more information as the Linux Plumbers Conference committee starts planning for the 2018 conference.

The LPC Planning Committee.

Audio Recordings Posted

This year, by way of an experiment we tried recording the audio through the sound system of the talks track and one Microconference track (Those in Platinum C).  Unfortunately, because of technical problems, we have no recordings from Wednesday, but mostly complete ones from Thursday and Friday (Missing TPM Software Stack Status and Managing the Impact of Growing CPU Register State).

To find the audio, go to the full description of the talk or Microconference (click on the title) and scroll down to the bottom of the Abstract (just before the Tags section).  The audio is downloadable mp3, so you can either stream directly to your browser or download for later offline listening.

If you find the audio useful (or not), please let us know (contact@linuxplumbersconf.org) so we can plan for doing it again next year.

Linux Plumbers Conference Unconference Schedule Announced

Since we only have six proposals, we can schedule them in the unconference session without any need for actual voting at breakfast.  On a purely random basis, the schedule will be:

Unconference I:

09:30 Test driven development (TDD) in the kernel – Knut Omang
11:00 Support for adding DT based thermal zones at runtime – Moritz Fischer
11:50 Restartable Sequences interaction with debugger single-stepping – Mathieu Desnoyers

Unconference II:

14:00 Automated testing of LKML patches with Clang – Nick Desaulniers
14:50 ktask: multithread cpu-intensive kernel work – Daniel Jordan
16:00 Soft Affinity for Workloads – Rohit Jain

I’ll add these to the plumbers schedule (if the author doesn’t already have an account, I’ll show up as the speaker, but please take the above list as definitive for actual speaker).

Looking forward to seeing you all at this exciting new event for Plumbers,

New to Plumbers: Unconference on Friday

The hallway track is always a popular feature of Linux Plumbers Conference.  New ideas and solutions emerge all the time.  But sometimes you start a discussion, and want to pull others in before the conference ends, and just can’t quite make it work.

This year, we’re trying an experiment at Linux Plumbers and reserving a room for an unconference session on Friday,  so the ad hoc problem solving sessions for those topics with the most participant interest can be held.

If there is a topic you want to have a 1 hour discussion around,  please put it on the etherpad with:

 

Topic:  <something short>
Host(s): <person who will host the discussion>
Description:   <describe problem you want to talk about>

 

We’ll close down the topic page on Thursday night at 8pm,  and print the collected topics out on In the morning and post them in the room.     During the breakfast period (from 8 to 9am), those wanting to participate will be given four dots to vote.  Vote by placing a dot on the topics of interest until 8:45am.   Sessions will be scheduled as the one with the most dots first, and in descending order until we run out of sessions or time.

Schedule will be posted in the room on Friday morning.

Linux Plumbers Conference Preliminary Schedule Published

You can see the schedule by clicking on the ‘schedule’ tab above or by going to this url

http://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2017/ocw/events/LPC2017/schedule

If you’d like any changes, please email contact@linuxplumbersconf.org and we’ll see what we can do to accommodate your request.

Please also remember that the schedule is subject to change.

Testing and Fuzzing Microconference Accepted into the Linux Plumbers Conference

We’re pleased to announce that newcomer Microconference Testing and Fuzzing will feature at Plumbers in Los Angeles this year.

The Agenda will feature the three fuzzers used for the Linux Kernel (Trinity, Syzkaller and Perf) along with discussion of formal verification tools, discussion of how to test stable trees, testing frameworks and also a discussion and demonstration of the drm/i915 checkin and test infrastructure.

Additionally, we will hold a session aimed at improving the testing process for linux-stable and distro kernels. Please plan to attend if you have input into how to integrate additional testing and make these kernels more reliable. Participants will include Greg Kroah-Hartman and major distro kernel maintainers.

For more details on this, please see this microconference’s wiki page.

We hope to see you there!

Tracing/BPF Microconference Accepted into the Linux Plumbers Conference

Following on from the successful Tracing Microconference last year, we’re pleased to announce there will be a follow on at Plumbers in Los Angeles this year.

The agenda for this year will not focus only on tracing but also will include several topics around eBPF. As eBPF now interacts with tracing and there is still a lot of work to accomplish, such as building an infrastructure around the current tools to compile and utilize eBPF within the tracing framework. Topics outside of eBPF will include enhancing uprobes and tracing virtualize and layered environments. Of particular interest is new techniques to improve kernel to user space tracing integration. This includes usage of uftrace and better symbol resolution of user space addresses from within the kernel. Additionally there will be a discussion on challenges of real world use cases by non-kernel engineers.

For more details on this, please see this microconference’s wiki page.

We hope to see you there!

Trusted Platform Module Microconference Accepted into the Linux Plumbers Conference

Following on from the TPM Microconference last year, we’re pleased to announce there will be a follow on at Plumbers in Los Angeles this year.

The agenda for this year will focus on a renewed attempt to unify the 2.0 TSS; cryptosystem integration to make TPMs just work for the average user; the current state of measured boot and where we’re going; using TXT with TPM in Linux and using TPM from containers.

For more details on this, please see this microconference’s wiki page

We hope to see you there!

Scheduler Workloads Microconference Accepted into the Linux Plumbers Conference

New to Linux Plumbers Conference this year, the Scheduler Workloads Microconference will focus on understanding various workloads and their impact on the Linux Kernel Scheduler. The objective is to initiate a cross organizational and architectural discussion involving currently available (or in development) benchmarks and their effectiveness in evaluating the scheduler for these workloads.

The agenda for this year will focus on sharing current workload and benchmark tools and traces and how these can be used to improve the various Linux subsystems, including power management and real time.  Given that benchmarking the Linux scheduler is a controversial topic and often depends on proprietary tools, we’ll also discuss how to develop fully open source tools and benchmarks for this.

For more details on this, please see this microconference’s wiki page.

We hope to see you there!