We are pleased to announce that the Call for Proposals for the Networking and BPF Summit at Linux Plumbers Conference 2020 is now open.
Please submit your proposals here.
Looking forward to seeing your great contributions!
Announcing Town Hall #2: The Kernel Weather Report
2020-07-01 – 19:02
Thank you to everyone who attended the Linux Plumbers town hall on June 25th. It was successful thanks to your participation. We’re pleased to announce another town hall on July 16th at 8am PST / 11am EST / 3pm GMT. This town hall will feature Jon Corbet of LWN giving “The Kernel Weather Report”.
The Linux kernel is at the core of any Linux system; the performance and capabilities of the kernel will, in the end, place an upper bound on what the system as a whole can do. This talk will review recent events in the kernel development community, discuss the current state of the kernel and the challenges it faces, and look forward to how the kernel may address those challenges. Attendees of any technical ability should gain a better understanding of how the kernel got to its current state and what can be expected in the near future.
Please note that the Plumbers Code of Conduct will be in effect for this event. We also plan to record this event. We will post the URL for the town hall on the LPC blog prior to the event. We hope to see you there and help make Plumbers the best conference for everyone.
How to Join the LPC Town Hall
2020-06-24 – 21:41
Please use the following link on Thursday June 25 2020 at 8am PDT/ 11am EDT/ 3pm GMT to join the LPC Town Hall:
https://linuxplumbers.lwn.net/b/lin-rs8-zoh
Note that no account is necessary!
Please refer to the previous post about the Town Hall to get more info.
See you there!
Registration for Linux Plumbers Conference 2020 is now open
2020-06-23 – 18:30
Registration is now open for the 2020 edition of the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). It will be held August 24 – 28, virtually. Go to the attend page for more information.
Note that the CFPs for microconferences, refereed track talks, and BoFs are still open, please see this page for more information.
As always, please contact the organizing committee if you have questions.
Kernel Dependability and Assurance Microconference Accepted into 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference
2020-06-22 – 10:52
We are pleased to announce that the Kernel Dependability & Assurance Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference!
Linux is now being used in applications that are going to require a high degree of confidence that the kernel is going to behave as expected. Some of the key areas we’re seeing Linux now start to be used are in medical devices, civil infrastructure, caregiving robots, automotives, etc. This brings up a number of concerns that must be addressed. What sort of uptime can we count on? Should safety analysis be reevaluated after a bug fix has been made? Are all the system requirements being satisfied by Linux? What tooling is there to solve these questions?
This microconference is the place that the kernels community can come together and discuss these major issues. Topics to be discussed include:
- Kernel Quality Assurance beyond Testing and CI
- Understanding the Users’ Expectations on Software Quality for safety critical systems:
- Define safety requirements for overall kernel: features, tests etc.
- Define run-time characteristics and requirements
- Identify missing features necessary to operate in safety critical environments.
- Regression Testing for safety: Identify configurations and tests critical and important for safety quality and dependability:
- Discuss and identify gaps in tests.
- Add tests and add configurations to existing test rings.
- Understanding the Kernel Development Organisation and Management
- Assessing, Measuring and Evaluating the Development Process
Come and join us in making the most popular operating system the most dependable as well. We hope to see you there!
Announcing a Linux Plumbers Virtual Town Hall
2020-06-19 – 13:03
The Linux Plumbers Committee is pleased to announce a Town Hall meeting on June 25 at 8am PDT/ 11am EDT/ 3pm GMT. This meeting serves two purposes. The first purpose is to test our remote conference set up. This is the first time we are holding Linux Plumbers virtually and while we can run simulated tests, it’s much more effective to test our setup with actual participants with differing hardware set ups around the world. The second purpose is to present on our planning and give everyone a little bit of an idea of what to expect when we hold Plumbers at the end of August. We plan to have time for questions.
Given this is a test, the number of participants will be capped at 250 people. The purpose of this test is to examine the scale to which the infrastructure can handle the expected demand for a virtual Linux Plumbers Conference. If you can’t make this day or are blocked by the participation cap from joining, we expect to be running more tests in the days to come.
Please note that the Plumbers Code of Conduct will be in effect for this event. We also plan to record this event as we will be recording sessions at the actual conference. We will post the URL for the town hall on the LPC blog prior to the event. We hope to see you there and help make Plumbers the best conference for everyone.
Linux Plumbers Conference Registration Opening Postponed
2020-06-15 – 14:20
The committee is relentlessly working on recreating online the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) experience that we have all come to appreciate, and take for granted, over the past few years.
We had initially planned to open registration on June 15th. While travel planning is not one, there are still very many aspects of the conference being worked on. We are now aiming to open registration for Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) on June 23rd.
Right now we have shortlisted BigBlueButton as our online conferencing solution. One of our objectives is to run LPC 2020 online on a full open software stack.
We anticipate running our usual set of parallel tracks, including microconferences per day. With our globally distributed participants, identifying the timezone most convenient is still work in progress. There will be a timezone question on our registration form, please make sure to answer it.
To help us test part of the online platform, and offer transparency about where things stand with LPC 2020 preparation, the committee is currently planning the first ever “LPC Town Hall Meeting”. We hope to host it very soon. More information will be made available very soon.
As previously announced, we are reducing the conference registration fee to US$50. Registration availability has been an issue in past years. We have no way to anticipate what the uptake will be for LPC 2020 registration. The committee will try its best to meet registration demand. Also, several Call for Proposals are open and awaiting your contributions.
We will be sharing more information with everyone here soon. Looking forward to LPC 2020 together with you.
Real-time Microconference Accepted into 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference
2020-06-15 – 11:19
We are pleased to announce that the Real-time Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference!
After another successful Real-time microconference at LPC last year, there’s still more to work to be done. The PREEMPT_RT patch set (aka “The Real-Time Patch”) was created in 2004 in the effort to make Linux into a hard real-time designed operating system. Over the years much of the RT patch has made it into mainline Linux, which includes: mutexes, lockdep, high resolution timers, Ftrace, RCU_PREEMPT, priority inheritance, threaded interrupts and much more. There’s just a little left to get RT fully into mainline, and the light at the end of the tunnel is finally in view. It is expected that the RT patch will be in mainline within a year (and possibly before Plumbers begins!), which changes the topics of discussion. Once it is in Linus’s tree, a whole new set of issues must be handled.
The focus on this years Plumbers events will include:
- Status of the PREEMPT_RT Merge
- Merge – what is missing and who can help?
- New tools for PREEMPT_RT analysis.
- How do we teach the rest of the kernel developers how not to break PREEMPT_RT?
- Stable maintainers tools discussion & improvements.
- The usage of PREEMPT_RT on safety critical-systems: what do we need to do?
- Interrupt threads are RT and are not protected by the RT Throttling. How can we prevent interrupt thread starvation from a rogue RT task?
We hope to see you there!
Scheduler Microconference Accepted into 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference
2020-06-11 – 11:11
We are pleased to announce that the Scheduler Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference!
The scheduler is an important functionality of the Linux kernel as it decides what gets to run, when and for how long. With different topologies and workloads this is no easy task to give the user the best experience possible. During the Scheduler microconference at LPC last year, we started the work to make SCHED_DEADLINE safe for kthreads and improving load balancing. This year, we continue working on core scheduling, unifying the interface for TurboSched and task latency nice, and continue the discussion on proxy execution.
Topics to be discussed include:
- Core Scheduling – How do we merge?
- Capacity Awareness – For busy systems
- Interrupt Awareness
- Proxy Execution – More cases
- Latency Nice – What interfaces do our use cases like?
- Load Balancing
- NUMA load balancing
- Formal specification of SCHED_DEADLINE
- Flattening CPU RQ hierarchy
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!
Containers and Checkpoint/Restore Microconference Accepted into 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference
2020-05-19 – 13:19
We are pleased to announce that the Containers and Checkpoint/Restore Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference!
After another successful Containers Microconference last year , there’s still a lot more work to be done. Last year we discussed the intersection between the new mount api and containers, various new vfs features including a strong and fruitful discussion about id shifting, several new security hardening aspects, and improvements when restarting syscalls during checkpoint/restore. Last year’s microconference topics led to quite a few patches that have since landed in the upstream kernel with others actively being discussed. This includes, various improvements to seccomp syscall interceptions, the implementation of a new process creation syscall, the implementation of pidfds, and the addition of time namespaces.
This year’s topics include:
- Next steps for uid/gid shifting for mounts and namespaces
- pidfds and their use for containers
- Handling of new mount APIs and unprivileged containers
- Solutions to transition from CgroupV1 to CgroupV2
- Use and limitations of the time namespace
- Hardware assisted isolation of processes/containers
Come join us and participate in the discussion with what holds “The Cloud” together.
We hope to see you there!
Christian, Mike, Stéphane
