Unfortunately we still do not know the total cost of the 4th track yet. We are still in the process of looking at the costs of adding another room, but we do not want to delay the acceptance of topics to Microconferences any further. We have decided to accept all pending Microconferences with one caveat. That is, we are not accepting the rest as full Microconferences. The Microconferences being accepted now will become one of the following at Linux Plumbers 2024:
- A full 3 hour Microconference
- A 1 and a half hour Microconference (Nanoconference)
- A full 3 hour Microconference but without normal Audio/Video
That last one is another option we are looking at. The main cost to having a 4th track is the manned AV operations. But we could add the 4th track without normal AV. Instead, these would get a BBB room where an Owl video camera (or the like) and a Jabra speaker will be in place. The quality of the AV will not be as good as having a fully manned room, but this would be better than being rejected from the conference, or having half the time of a full microconference.
Even with a 4th track, two still need to become Nanoconferences.
In the mean time, we will be accepting the rest of the Microconferences so that they can start putting together content. How they are presented at Linux Plumbers is still to be determined.
Note that this also means we will likely be dropping the 3 free passes that a Microconference usually gets down to only 2 passes.
The accepted Microconferences (as full, half or no A/V) are:
- Sched_ext
- Containers and Checkpoint/Restore
- Confidential Computing
- Real-Time
- Build Systems
- RISC-V
- Compute Express Link
- X86
- VFIO/IOMMU/PCI
- System Boot and Security
- Zone Storage
- Internet of Things
- Embedded
- Complex Cameras
- Power Management and Thermal Control
- Kernel <-> Userspace/Init/System Management Boundaries and APIs
