Linux Plumbers Conference 2026

Session

LPC Refereed Track

Not scheduled

201. 20 years of pahole : alive and kicking!

Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo (Red Hat Inc.)

The first cset for pahole is from October 24, 2006, a long time ago, from the first goals of helping reorganize the Linux kernel networking data structures, that was done beyond my expectations, helping countless open source projects to view its data structures with great precision and flexibility, to becoming a swiss army knife tool to convert type information from DWARF to CTF and,...

152. When Embedded Codecs Meet Graphics

Nicolas Dufresne (Collabora Ltd.)

In the current Linux kernel, video codecs split into two categories. Accelerators built into GPUs are implemented as thin drivers with userspace components exposing APIs such as Vulkan Video or VA-API. Everything else falls under the Video4Linux kernel API. This fragmentation adds complexity for both kernel and userspace developers. VA-API has stagnated and carries historical assumptions tied...

61. Modernizing Kernel Boot Options: Resolving cmdline and Bootconfig Discrepancies

Mr Masami Hiramatsu (Google)

The current Linux kernel command-line subsystem is very simple and easy to define, but it seems to have several problems, such as inconsistent API naming, drivers and the kernel sharing the same command-line options, and discrepancies between documentation and command-line option definitions. Furthermore, some options require special handling and cannot be supported by Bootconfig, an extension...

79. Firmware-mediated accelerators for edge AI

Tomeu Vizoso (NPU drivers - Independent contractor)

A well-represented class of accelerators for AI in edge deployments aren't programmed directly by the Linux kernel in the host CPU, but by firmware running on a companion core.

During the first half of 2026 alone, we have seen three different drivers submitted to the mailing list for this specific type of hardware, by their respective vendors or on their behalf (TI C7x, NXP Neutron and...

82. Modern Developments with NFS in Linux

Jeffrey Layton

The Linux Kernel's NFS server and client has been undergoing a lot of changes recently. This talk will cover some of the latest developments in the Linux NFS Client and Server in the last few years. Including:

• Dynamic threading
• New iomodes (buffered, direct and dontcache)
• Directory delegations
• POSIX ACLs for NFSv4
• Signed filehandles
• Delegated timestamps
• Multigrain...

196. Cryptographic Proofs of Personhood: Solving the Kernel Web of Trust Problem in a Privacy-Preserving Manner

Mr Drummond Reed (First Person Cooperative), Mr Glenn Gore (Affinidi), Hart Montgomery (Linux Foundation)

In any open source software project, maintainer identity is becoming a critical problem. How can you be confident that someone contributing a patch (or PR) is not a malicious adversary? Attacks like the XZUtils compromise have heightened the concern around this sort of software supply chain attack, and the “North Korean developer” problem plagues both companies and open source...

202. Virtio-GPU for Automotive: Implementing Libkrun + Vhost-User.

Dorinda Bassey (Red Hat)

Automotive hardware architectures are consolidating standalone Electronic Control Units (ECUs) into centralized compute platforms. A major challenge in this architecture is safely and efficiently sharing a single GPU across multiple isolated virtual machines. For example, systems must run critical instrument clusters, infotainment setups, and ADAS pipelines simultaneously without risking...

236. RCU Transactions: Bridging the gap between RCU and STM

Mathieu Desnoyers (EfficiOS Inc.)

RCU data structures are notoriously complex to design mainly due to the
need to carefully manage how mutations are made observable to concurrent
readers.

As a general solution to this problem, I am proposing a novel
transaction-based synchronisation mechanism: "RCU Transactions"
(urcu_txn).

It applies both to userspace and kernel. It allows publishing complex
data structure...

231. Long-term latency monitoring of real-time Linux systems

Jan Altenberg

With the PREEMPT_RT configuration being merged for the 6.12 release a milestone of a twenty years lasting journey was reached: Linux officially became an RTOS! During that time many technical issues have been resolved and many features have been added that made Linux even better even for non real-time users. A specific challenge which had to be tackled was testing and proving the real-time...

173. Nova: Building an NVIDIA GPU Driver in Rust Upstream

Danilo Krummrich, John Hubbard (NVIDIA)

Nova is an open-source NVIDIA GPU driver being developed entirely upstream from day one — and in Rust. This talk presents the current status and roadmap of the project, describes the upstream development process, and dives into the driver's architecture and how Rust shapes it.

Developing a complex GPU driver fully upstream while simultaneously building out the Rust kernel infrastructure it...

147. Devicetree-ACPI hybrid mode

Hans de Goede (Qualcomm)

Currently when booting in Devicetree mode the kernel will fully disable the ACPI subsystem. On WoA Snapdragon laptops where the factory Windows OS actually boots using the ACPI tables this is not necessarily desirable.

The purpose of this session is to present and discuss a proposal for a new DT-ACPI hybrid mode, in which while booting with Devicetree:

1. The ACPI tables are still parsed...

184. Untangling convoluted performance regression

Jan Kara

In this talk I will speak about a performance regression in DB2 backup speed reported by one of SUSE's customer last year. Due to various reasons the analysis was rather convoluted so I will go through the dead ends we have explored as well as leads which eventually allowed us to track down and fix the problem. Overall we demonstrate on a practical example how various tools for analyzing IO...

86. A Loadable Crypto Module for FIPS Certification

Jay Wang (Amazon)

Many organizations require US Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) certification of the crypto code they are running. The certification process is lengthy (typically 12–18 months), but the bigger problem is that the way the crypto subsystem is built into the kernel makes the result unable to be reused across kernel updates. This is because FIPS certification is granted at the binary...

30. From CVE to Fix in Minutes: AI-Augmented Security Lifecycle Management for Linux Distributions

Kanishk Bansal

Linux Plumbers Conference 2026 — Proposal

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Recommended Track

Distributions Microconference

Why this track: The proposal centers on distro-level CVE lifecycle management — scanning, triage, patching, backporting, and release engineering — which sits squarely in the Distributions MC's scope. It addresses pain points shared by every LTS distro maintainer (Debian,...

230. BPF_PROG_TEST_RUN: the hidden perils of testing.

Lucas Castanheira (CMU), Prof. Theophilus Benson (Carnegie Mellon University)

BPF_PROG_TEST_RUN has been a crucial tool for testing eBPF programs. Although it has been instrumental for XDP, as BPF spreads to other hookpoints (e.g., TC, sock_ops, struct_ops) that rely on complex data structures such as the SKB, we found that it provides an environment that diverges significantly from the kernel: it does not model these structures and instead defaults their state to...

11. Rust SPDM in the Kernel

Alistair Francis

Security Protocols and Data Models (SPDM) is used for authentication, attestation and key exchange. SPDM is generally used over a range of transports, such as PCIe, MCTP/SMBus/I3C, ATA, SCSI, NVMe or TCP.

From the kernels perspective SPDM is used to authenticate and attest devices. In this threat model a device is considered untrusted until it can be...

21. Improving kernel test coverage using stress-ng

Colin King (stress-ng)

The Linux kernel is constantly growing and evolving; unfortunately, corner-case regressions can creep into code in every release. Gcov test coverage can find infrequently used code paths that may contain issues. This presentation discusses how such techniques are used to improve kernel testing with stress-ng and the challenges in reaching full test coverage.

78. The State of the Kconfig Ecosystem

Julian Braha

Part 1: The Many Implementations of Kconfig
Kconfig, a language originally introduced for use in the Linux build system, has grown to over 300,000 lines of usage in Linux itself, and has been adopted by many other open source projects, like coreboot, BusyBox, Zephyr, and more. However, Kconfig does not have a specification like other languages, and is implemented differently in each of...

150. Checkpoint/Restore for RDMA: Saving and Restoring Live Queue Pairs with CRIU

Raphael Norwitz (nvidia)

RDMA delivers high-throughput, low-latency networking by bypassing the kernel and letting applications communicate directly with the hardware. CRIU, by contrast, works by freezing running processes and serializing their state so they can be restored later. Bringing the two together is difficult precisely because of what makes RDMA fast: RDMA bypasses the kernel abstractions CRIU would normally...