We are pleased to announce that the Toolchain Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference!

The GNU toolchain has direct impact on the development of the Linux kernel and it is imperative that the developers of both ecosystems have an understanding of each other’s needs. Linux Plumbers is the perfect venue for the two communities to interact, and the GNU Toolchain microconference’s purpose is to facilitate that happening.

Last year’s meetup at Linux Plumbers proved that it is critical that the two communities communicate with each other. As a result of last year’s microconference, the GNU toolchain has completed adding support for BPF, in a more flexible and usable way and system call wrappers in glibc were improved. There have been security features derived from the discussions, such as zeroing of registers when entering a function and implicit initialization of atomics.

This year’s topics to be discussed include:

• How to improve the continual communication between GNU toolchain developers and kernel developers.
• Creating a standardization on how to compile the kernel that is suitable for all Live kernel patching frameworks.
• Now that BPF support is in the GNU toolchain, including a new BPF instruction simulator, we’d like some feedback from kernel developers regarding its usability and whether more features are needed.
• Compact C Type Format (CTF) has been added to the GNU toolchain, and there is work underway to also add BTF support. However some useful features are still missing (like backtraces) and their design needs to be discussed and agreed upon among toolchain and kernel developers.

Come and join us in the discussion about innovating the most efficient and functional toolchain for building the Linux kernel.

We hope to see you there!