Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the Power Management and Thermal Control Microconference
The Power Management and Thermal Control microconference focuses on frameworks related to power management and thermal control, CPU and device power-management mechanisms, and thermal-control methods. In particular, we are interested in extending the energy-efficient scheduling concept beyond the energy-aware scheduling (EAS), improving the thermal control framework in the kernel to cover more use cases and making system-wide suspend (and power management in general) more robust.
The goal is to facilitate cross-framework and cross-platform discussions that can help improve energy-awareness and thermal control in Linux.
Suggested topics:
- Energy-efficient scheduling beyond EAS
- Per-CPU idle injection from user space for thermal control
- A generic energy model description
- Extending the DTPM framework by adding more supported devices to it
- Thermal control core code improvements
- Combining DTPM with the thermal control framework
- Generic DVFS support for SCMI-based platforms
- Improving the genpd governor for CPUs
- More integration between PM-runtime and system-wide PM
Please come and join us in the discussion about keeping your systems cool.
We hope to see you there!
Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the System Boot and Security Microconference
In the fourth year in a row, System Boot and Security microconference is are going to bring together people interested in the firmware, bootloaders, system boot, security, etc., and discuss all these topics. This year we would particularly like to focus on better communication and closer cooperation between different Free Software and Open Source projects. In the past we have seen that the lack of cooperation’s between projects very often delays introduction of very interesting and important features with TrenchBoot being very prominent example.
The System Boot and Security MC is very important to improve such communication and cooperation, but it is not limited to this kind of problems. We would like to encourage all stakeholders to bring and discuss issues that they encounter in the broad sense of system boot and security.
Expected topics:
- TPMs, HSMs, secure elements
- Roots of Trust: SRTM and DRTM
- Intel TXT, SGX, TDX
- AMD SKINIT, SEV
- ARM DRTM
- Growing Attestation ecosystem,
- IMA
- TrenchBoot, tboot
- UEFI, coreboot, U-Boot, LinuxBoot, hostboot
- Measured Boot, Verified Boot, UEFI Secure Boot, UEFI Secure Boot Advanced Targeting (SBAT)
- shim
- boot loaders: GRUB2, SeaBIOS, network boot, PXE, iPXE,
- u-root
- OpenBMC, u-bmc
- legal, organizational and other similar issues relevant for people interested in system boot and security.
Please come and join us in the discussion about how to keep your system secure from the very boot.
We hope to see you there!
Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the VFIO/IOMMU/PCI Microconference
The PCI interconnect specification, the devices that implement it, and the system IOMMUs that provide memory and access control to them are nowadays a de-facto standard for connecting high-speed components, incorporating more and more features such as:
- Address Translation Service (ATS)/Page Request Interface (PRI)
- Single-root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV)/Process Address Space ID (PASID)
- Shared Virtual Addressing (SVA)
- Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)
- Peer-to-Peer DMA (P2PDMA)
- Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX)
- Compute Express Link (CXL)
- Data Object Exchange (DOE)
- Component Measurement and Authentication (CMA)
- Integrity and Data Encryption (IDE)
- Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM)
- Gen-Z
These features are aimed at high-performance systems, server and desktop computing, embedded and SoC platforms, virtualization, and ubiquitous IoT devices.
The kernel code that enables these new system features focuses on coordination between the PCI devices, the IOMMUs they are connected to and the VFIO layer used to manage them (for userspace access and device passthrough) with related kernel interfaces and userspace APIs to be designed in-sync and in a clean way for all three sub-systems.
The VFIO/IOMMU/PCI micro-conference focuses on the kernel code that enables these new system features that often require coordination between the VFIO, IOMMU and PCI sub-systems.
Tentative topics include (but not limited to):
- PCI
- Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX)/Compute Express Link (CXL) expansion memory and accelerators management
- Data Object Exchange (DOE)
- Integrity and Data Encryption (IDE)
- Component Measurement and Authentication (CMA)
- Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM)
- I/O Address Space ID Allocator (IOASID)
- INTX/MSI IRQ domain consolidation
- Gen-Z interconnect fabric
- ARM64 architecture and hardware
- PCI native host controllers/endpoints drivers current challenges and improvements (e.g., state of PCI quirks, etc.)
- PCI error handling and management e.g., Advanced Error Reporting (AER), Downstream Port Containment (DPC), ACPI Platform Error Interface (APEI) and Error Disconnect Recover (EDR)
- Power management and devices supporting Active-state Power Management (ASPM)
- Peer-to-Peer DMA (P2PDMA)
- Resources claiming/assignment consolidation
- Probing of native PCIe controllers and general reset implementation
- Prefetchable vs non-prefetchable BAR address mappings
- Untrusted/external devices management
- DMA ownership models
- Thunderbolt, DMA, RDMA and USB4 security
- VFIO
- Write-combine on non-x86 architectures
- I/O Page Fault (IOPF) for passthrough devices
- Shared Virtual Addressing (SVA) interface
- Single-root I/O Virtualization(SRIOV)/Process Address Space ID (PASID) integration
- PASID in SRIOV virtual functions
- Device assignment/sub-assignment
- IOMMU
- /dev/iommufd development
- IOMMU virtualization
- IOMMU drivers SVA interface
- DMA-API layer interactions and the move towards generic dma-ops for IOMMU drivers
- Possible IOMMU core changes (e.g., better integration with device-driver core, etc.)
Come and join us in the discussion in helping Linux keep up with the new features being added to the PCI interconnect specification.
We hope to see you there !
Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the Android Microconference
Continuing in the same direction as last year, this year’s Android microconference will be an opportunity to foster collaboration between the Android and Linux kernel communities. Discussions will be centered on the goal of ensuring that both the Android and Linux development moves in a lockstep fashion going forward.
Projected topics:
- io_uring in Android
- MGLRU results on Android
- Hermetic builds with Bazel
- Android kernel testing updates
- pKVM
- erofs as a replacement for f2fs and the deprecation of ext4
- eBPF-based FUSE
- stgdiff tools
- Technical debt
- Parallelized suspend/resume
- CPU DVFS for guest thread migrations
Please come and join us in the discussion of making Android a better partner with Linux.
We hope to see you there!
Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the Open Printing Microconference
OpenPrinting has been improving the way we print in Linux. Over the years we have changed many conventional ways of printing and scanning. Over the last few years we have been emphasizing on the fact that driverless print and scan has made life easier however this does not make us stop improving. Every day we are trying to design new ways of printing to make your printing and scanning experience better than that of today.
Proposed Topics :
- CUPS 2.5 and 3.0 Development
- 3D Printing
- Testing and CI for OpenPrinting projects
- Documentation for OpenPrinting projects
- Sandboxing/Containerizing alternatives to Snap for Printer Applications or CUPS
Please come and join us in the discussion to bring Linux printing, scanning and fax a better experience.
We hope to see you there!
Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the CPU Isolation Microconference
CPU Isolation is an ability to shield workloads with extreme latency or performance requirements from interruptions (also known as Operating System noise) provided by a close combination of several kernel and userspace components. An example of such workloads are DPDK use cases in Telco/5G where even the shortest interruption can cause packet losses, eventually leading to exceeding QoS requirements.
Despite considerable improvements in the last few years towards implementing full CPU Isolation (nohz_full, rcu_nocb, isolcpus, etc.), there are issues to be addressed, as it is still relatively simple to highlight sources of OS noise just by running synthetic workloads mimicking polling (always running) type of application similar to the ones mentioned above.
There were recent improvements and discussions about CPU isolation features on LKML, and tools such as osnoise tracer and rtla osnoise improved the CPU isolation analysis. Nevertheless, this is an ongoing process, and discussions are needed to speed up solutions for existing issues and to improve the existing tools and methods.
The purpose of CPU Isolation MC is to get together to discuss open problems, most notably: how to improve the identification of OS noise sources, how to track them publicly and how to tackle the sources of noise that have already been identified.
A non exhaustive list of potential topics is:
- OS noise profiling (format and public DB for the community)
- Tracing to detect OS noise: the rtla osnoise tracer and what it’s missing
- TLB/icache flush deferral
- Extend cpuset v2 CPU partition feature to replace isolcpus kernel command line
- rt-trace-bpf tool
- Task isolation
- smp_call_function API improvements
Please come and join us in the discussion about CPU isolation.
We hope to see you there!
Because we ran out of places so fast, we are setting up a waitlist for in-person registration (virtual attendee places are still available). Please fill in this form and try to be clear about your reasons for wanting to attend. This year we’re giving waitlist priority to new attendees and people expected to contribute content. We expect to be able to accept our first group of attendees from the waitlist in mid July.
Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the IoT Microconference
The IoT microconference is back for its fourth year and our Open Source HW / SW / FW communities are productizing Linux and Zephyr in ways that we have never seen before.
A lot has happened in the last year to discuss and bring forward:
- The Zephyr Project released LTSv2
- PyFive went from concept to an Open Source Silicon SoC via Google’s eFabless shuttle. How will Open Source Silicon affect IoT?
- Apache Thrift running in Zephyr. A new entry in the IoT toolbox.
- Linux-wpan gains mac802154 support for scanning, beaconing and coordinator handling
- The Sound Open Firmware (SoF) project combines Linux ASOC drivers with Zephyr audio DSP firmware
- The Oniro Project breaks ground with a Matter + OpenThread gateway blueprint
- A Matter open source project is being actively developed..
- Linux-and-Zephyr-based products built with Yocto..
Each of the above items were large efforts made by Linux centric communities actively pushing the bounds of what is possible in IoT.
Whether you are an apprentice or master, we welcome you to bring your plungers and join us for a deep dive into the pipework of Linux IoT!
We hope to see you there!
Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the Real-time and Scheduling Microconference
The real-time and scheduling micro-conference joins these two intrinsically connected communities to discuss the next steps together.
Over the past decade, many parts of PREEMPT_RT have been included in the official Linux codebase. Examples include real-time mutexes, high-resolution timers, lockdep, ftrace, RCU_PREEMPT, threaded interrupt handlers and more. The number of patches that need integration has been significantly reduced, and the rest is mature enough to make their way into mainline Linux.
The scheduler is the core of Linux performance. With different topologies and workloads, it is not an easy task to give the user the best experience possible, from low latency to high throughput, and from small power-constrained devices to HPC.
This year’s topics to be discussed include:
- How to scalqe PREEMPT_RT for very-large systems
- Improve overall system partitioning for real-time HPC workloads
- New tools for PREEMPT_RT analysis.
- How do we teach the rest of the kernel developers how not to break PREEMPT_RT?
- The usage of PREEMPT_RT on safety-critical systems: what do we need to do?
- The merge’s status, and how can we resolve the last issues that block the merge.
- Latency nice scheduling feature
- Better support for new processors
- What’s next?
Please come and join us in the discussion of controlling what tasks get to run on your machine and when.
We hope to see you there!
Back in 2021 when we were planning this conference, everyone warned us that we’d still be doing social distancing and that in-person conferences were likely not to be as popular as they had been, so we lowered our headcount to fit within a socially distanced venue. Unfortunately the enthusiasm of the plumbers community didn’t follow this conventional wisdom so the available registrations sold out within days of being released. We’re now investigating how we might expand the venue capacity to accommodate some of the demand for in-person registration, so stay tuned for what we find out.
