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.

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.

System bringup is a critical part of the lifecycle of the system. There are many different ways to configure the kernel based on how its going to be used. This miniconference will focus on securely bringing up linux in containers and embedded systems – and ways to improve size, timing, and interfaces with other system components.

Checkpoint/restart technology is the basis for live migration as well as its traditional use to take a snapshot of a long-running job. This microconference will focus on the C/R project called CRIU and will bring together people from Canonical, CloudLinux, Georgia Institute of Technology, Google, Parallels, and Qualcomm to discuss CRIU integration with the various containers projects, its use on Android, performance and testing issues and, of course, to show some live demoes. See the Checkpoint/Restart wiki for more information.

Over the past year, the advent of Docker has further increased the level of Containers excitement. Additional points of Containers interest include the LXC 1.1 release (which includes CRIU checkpoint/restore, in-container systemd support, and feature-set compatibility across systemd, sysvinit, and upstart), the recently announced merger of OpenVZ and Cloud server, and progress in the kernel namespace and cgroups infrastructure.

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).

The Linux Plumbers 2015 Device Tree Tools, Validation, and Troubleshooting track focuses on tools (programs and scripts), techniques, and core support to enable creation of correct device trees and to support troubleshooting and debugging of incorrect device trees, drivers, and subsystems.

Energy efficiency has received considerable attention, for example, the microconference at last year’s Plumbers. However, despite another year’s worth of vigorous efforts, there is still quite a bit left to be desired in Linux’s power management and in its energy-aware scheduling in particular, hence this year’s microconference.

Energy efficiency has received considerable attention, for example, the microconference at last year’s Plumbers. However, despite another year’s worth of vigorous efforts, there is still quite a bit left to be desired in Linux’s power management and in its energy-aware scheduling in particular, hence this year’s microconference.

The Linux Plumbers 2015 File and Storage Systems track focuses on userspace interactions with ongoing work in the filesystem and IO stack. The format will resemble past years, in which a discussion is framed with a few slides or some opening comments before broadening into a larger discussion involving the attendees.

Although the Year of the Linux Desktop has yet to arrive, Linux
graphics support continues to be critically important for a great many
users. Automotive, smartphones, digital signage, smart TVs, and more,
have come to rely on our display stack. This microconference will cover
a number of topics including atomic mdoesetting in KMS, buffer
allocation, verified-secure graphics pipelines, fencing and
synchronisation, Wayland, and more.

Over the past year there has been a lot of progress in patching LLVM and Clang in order to be able to compile the Linux kernel. Over the same time period progress was made on building both the Linux kernel and Android userspace. Clang is also now distributed as part of the Android NDK. We now need to get patches accepted to support the use of clang/LLVM to build the Linux Kernel and more of the Android code base.

This microconference will gather interested parties from the Linux kernel, LLVM, and Android communities to plan the most expedient way to get support for using Clang upstream.

Welcome to the “Networking” microconference of Plumbers 2015. This track was named “Network Virtualization” in previous years. Upon request we are opening up the spectrum for this year. We have however decided to define a list of interesting networking topics that we want to focus on. We will therefore favour discussion topics which fall into the following list of topics:

• IPv6
• Network Virtualization
• Security

As in previous years, we are enforcing a hard limit of 3 slides per presentation to ensure focus on discussion over monologues. Marketing pitches will not be tolerated and will be shut down. (If you feel the urge to put your company logo onto slides you are probably in the wrong room anyway)

If you are interested in presenting on this topic then please list yourself in the section “Proposed Topics” below.

The Linux Plumbers 2015 microconference – Performance and Scalability track focuses on scalability, both upwards and downwards as well as up and down the stack. There are quite a few active projects and efforts of a wide range that aim at enhanncing performance and scalability both in the Linux kernel and in user-space projects. In fact, one of the purposes of this forum is for developers from different projects to meet and collaborate – both kernel developers and researchers, doing more experimental work. After all, for the user to see good performance and scalability, all relevant projects must perform and scale well.

Because performance and scalability are very generic topics, this track is aimed at issues that are not addressed in other, more specific sessions, such as networking.

The structure will be similar to what was followed the previous years (2011, 2012 and 2013): about 30 minutes per subject with discussion.

The Linux Plumbers 2015 Persistent Memory track focuses on the kernel and userspace plumbing for byte-addressable (direct cpu load/store) persistent memory. ACPI 6.0, released earlier this year, formalizes a mechanism for platform firmware to advertise peristent memory (NVDIMM) resources to an operating system. With NVDIMM resources poised to become a standard platform feature this track discusses the challenges and opportunities for Linux plumbing to leverage this new capability.

The Linux Plumbers 2015 thermal track focuses on finding solutions for kernel and userland changes for standardized thermal management in Linux systems.