Linux Plumbers Conference 2008

I spent the latter half of last week at the Linux Plumbers Conference in downtown Portland. And despite being a new conference, I found it to be one of the best conferences I've attended. I think this might be in part to its small size, there was a much better average developer to community leader ratio than at other conferences, indeed some of the key leaders don't even attend some of the larger conferences. The fact that LPC piggy-backed on Kernel Summit had a lot to do with the turnout. So what was exciting?

"If you want to do it right, do what IBM does, do what Intel does. -- Greg KH"
Well, maybe that was only funny to me...

While there was a lot of great content, the things that stood out to me were:

From Naught to Sixty in 5 Seconds

Arjam van de Ven and Auke Kok shared their work on getting Fedora and Ubuntu to boot in under 5 seconds on a netbook. While the SSD drives were key here, they still could do 10 seconds with rotating platters. Key bits including Super Read Ahead, disabling everthing you don't use, and picking on everyone that wasted boot time :-) Canonical took another hit here for GDM taking 3 seconds to start (60% of their total schedule!) due to storing massive pngs that it scaled down at each run to fit the current resolution. Definitely plan to look at my boot process and see if I can knock a few 10s of seconds off.

Git Tutorial

So was this cool only because it was Linus presenting? Yes and no. Linus is actually a great presenter. He is bright (duh) but also witty and engaging. He had no slides and simply walked the room through some git usage. While most everyone in the room had used git before, no-one seemed ruffled by it. It was nice to hear first-hand why git is the way it is. Did I come away from it loving git - uh... no. But it did clear up some of the issues I had with it - mostly by correcting my perspective on how it should be used.

Graphics Drivers in the Kernel: 20 Years Late

Dave Ailie and Jesse Barnes (among others) discussed the work being done to move video drivers into the kernel (from xorg userspace where they are now). Specifically memory management and mode setting. There was some good debate between the speakers and Linus, which ended with three of the speakers simultaneously stating "Well, you're wrong!" to the chief penguin. There was a good chuckle from the crowd, things usually go the other way. The presenters knew their work, they knew the interactions of the various pieces, and they were able to defend their approach which Linus didn't accept at first. His pragmatism was very apparent during the discussion and his drive toward simplicity made very clear. An excellent discussion. So what does this mean for users? hopefully those of us with the right chipsets will not have to watch our screens struggle through resolution changes 3 times during a single boot :-)

Hallway Dialog

While the formal talks and discussions were great, the best part of any conference is the one on one time with the people you work with over email and irc the rest of the year. For me this was a lunch with Thomas Gleixner, Steven Rostedt, and Gregory Haskins. We discussed the problems pthread condition variables have with priority inheritance, and formed a game plan to get the solution moving forward. It's a tough problem, and largely logistical in nature rather than technical. Changing APIs (and ABIs) at the glibc level is a painful process (for good reason).

All in all, it was a great conference. A lot of good discussion between the developers of various systems was had (which was of course the intent). Thanks to IBM for letting me attend, and thanks to the organizers who donated so much of their time to the event.