We are pleased to announce that the Real-Time Microconference has been accepted into the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference! 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, 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 year’s Plumbers events will include:
Come and join us in the discussion of making the LWN prediction of RT coming into mainline “this year” a reality!
We hope to see you there!
We are pleased to announce that the Testing and Fuzzing Microconference has been accepted into the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference! Testing and fuzzing are crucial to the stability that the Linux kernel demands.
Last year’s microconference brought about a number of discussions; for example, syzkaller evolved as syzbot, which keeps track of fuzzing efforts and the resulting fixes. The closing ceremony pointed out all the work that still has to be done: There are a number of overlapping efforts, and those need to be consolidated. The use of KASAN should be increased. Where is fuzzing going next? With real-time moving forward from “if” to “when” in the mainline, how does RT test coverage increase? The unit-testing frameworks may need some unification. Also, KernelCI will be announced as an LF project this time around. Stay around for the KernelCI hackathon after the conference to help further those efforts.
Come and join us for the discussion!
We hope to see you there!
We are pleased to announce that the Toolchains Microconference has been accepted into the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference! The Linux kernel may
be one of the most powerful systems around, but it takes a powerful toolchain to make that happen. The kernel takes advantage of any feature
that the toolchains provide, and collaboration between the kernel and toolchain developers will make that much more seamless.
Toolchains topics will include:
- Header harmonization between kernel and glibc
- Wrapping syscalls in glibc
- eBPF support in toolchains
- Potential impact/benefit/detriment of recently developed GCC optimizations on the kernel
- Kernel hot-patching and GCC
- Online debugging information: CTF and BTF
- Development and parity between GCC and LLVM
Come and join us in the discussion of what makes it possible to build the most robust and flexible kernel in the world!
We hope to see you there!
We are pleased to announce that the Open Printing Microconference has been accepted into the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference! In today’s world much is done online. But getting a hardcopy is still very much needed, even today. Then there’s the case of having a hardcopy and wanting to scan it to make it digital. All of this is needed to be functional on Linux to keep Linux-based and open source operating systems relevant. Also, with the progress in technology, the usage of modern printers and scanners is becoming simple. The driverless concept has made printing and scanning easier and gets the job done with some simple clicks without requiring the user to install any kind of driver software. The Open Printing organization has been tasked with getting this job done. This Microconference will focus on what needs to be accomplished to keep Linux and open source operating systems a leader in today’s market.
Topics for this Microconference include:
Come and join us in the discussion of keeping your printers working.
We hope to see you there!
We are pleased to announce that the Live Patching Microconference has been accepted into the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference! There are some workloads that require 100% uptime so rebooting for maintenance is not an option. But this can make the system insecure as new security vulnerabilities may have been discovered in the running kernel. Live kernel patching is a technique to update the kernel without taking down the machine. As one can imagine, patching a running kernel is far from trivial. Although it is being used in production today[1][2], there are still many issues that need to be solved.
These include:
- API for state changes made by callbacks [3][4]
- Source-based livepatch creation tooling [5][6] (klp-convert) [7][8]
- Livepatch developers guide
- Userspace live patching
Come and join us in the discussion about changing your running kernel without having to take it down!
We hope to see you there!
We are pleased to announce that the You, Me and IoT Microconference has been accepted into the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference! IoT is becoming an
integral part of our daily lives, controlling such devices as on/off switches, temperature controls, door and window sensors and so much more. But the technology itself requires a lot of infrastructure and communication frameworks such as Zigbee, OpenHAB and 6LoWPAN. Open source Real-Time embedded operating systems also come into play like Zephyr. A completely open source framework implementation is Greybus that already made it into staging. Discussions will be around Greybus:
– Device management
– Abstracted devices
– Management of Unique IDs
– Network management
– Userspace utilities
– Network Authentication
– Encryption
– Firmware updates
– And more
Come join us and participate in the discussion on what keeps the Internet of Things together.
We hope to see you there!
We are pleased to announce that the Containers and Checkpoint/Restore Microconference has been accepted into the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference! Even after the success of last year’s Containers Microconference, there’s still more to work on this year.
Last year had a security focus that featured seccomp support and LSM namespacing and stacking, but now the need to look at the next steps and sets of blockers for those needs to be discussed.
Since last year’s Linux Plumbers in Vancouver, binderfs has been accepted into mainline, but more work is needed in order to fully support Android containers.
Another improvement since Vancouver is that shiftfs is now functional and included in Ubuntu, however, more work is required (including changes to VFS) before shiftfs can be accepted into mainline.
CGroup V2 is an ongoing task needing more work, with one topic of particular interest being feature parity with V1.
Additional important discussion topics include:
- Even better container security
- New namespaces (time, logging, …)
- Adoption and improvement of the new mount and pidfd APIs
- Speeding up container live migration.
Come join us and participate in the discussion on what holds “The Cloud” together.
We are pleased to announce that the Distribution Kernels Microconference has been accepted to the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference. This is the
first time Plumbers has offered a microconference focused on kernel distribution collaboration.
Linux distributions come in many forms, ranging from community run distributions like Debian and Gentoo, to commercially supported ones offered by SUSE or Red Hat, to focused embedded distributions like Android or Yocto. Each of these distributions maintains a kernel, making choices related to features and stability. The focus of this track is on the pain points distributions face in maintaining their chosen kernel and common solutions every distribution can benefit from.
Example topics include:
- Backporting kernel patches and how to make it easier
- Consuming the stable kernel trees
- Automated testing for distributions
- Managing ABIs
- Distribution packaging/infrastructure
- Cross distribution bug reporting and tracking
- Common distribution kconfig
- Distribution default settings
- Which patch sets are distributions carrying?
“Distribution kernel” is used in a very broad manner. If you maintain a kernel tree for use by others, we welcome you to come and share your experiences.
Here is a list of proposed topics. For Linux Plumbers 2019, new topics for microconferences can be submitted via the Call for Proposals (CfP) interface. Please visit the CfP page for more information.
A few days ago we added more capacity to the earlybird registration quota, but that too has now filled up, so your next opportunity to register for Plumbers will be Regular Registration on 30 June … or alternatively the call for presentations to the refereed track is still open and accepted talks will get a free pass.
Quotas were added a few years ago to avoid the entire conference selling out months ahead of time and accommodate attendees whose approval process takes a while or whose company simply won’t allow them to register until closer to the date of the conference.
The Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) registration web site has been showing “sold out” recently because the cap on early bird registrations
was reached. We are happy to report that we have reviewed the registration numbers for this year’s conference and were able to open more early bird registration slots. Beyond that, regular registration will open July 1st. Please note that speakers and microconference runners get free passes to LPC, as do some microconference presenters, so that may be another way to attend the conference. Time is running out for new refereed-track and microconference proposals, so visit the CFP page soon. Topics for accepted microconferences are welcome as well.
LPC will be held in Lisbon, Portugal from Monday, September 9 through Wednesday, September 11.
We hope to see you there!
