This year I attended my second Linux Symposium. The conference was back in its home town of Ottawa, the capital of Canada. Strangely there is no direct flight between our capitals, that is Brussels, Ottawa, so I had to fly through Montreal, where the Linux Symposium was last year and I decided to take the train from Montreal Dorval to Ottawa Central. My choice was based upon one there is internet in the train, two it would be quicker and three it was cheaper.
I arrived on Sunday, getting settled into my hotel, the Ottawa Westin, and went on exploring the surroundings, afterward in the evening, I did meet with Andrew “android” Clunis.
The next morning, Monday, I went to see Trudeau Hall and walked around in Ottawa, getting to know the city as I usually do. When I got back at the hotel, Robin “robbat2″ Johnson, was in the lobby, as both of us hadn’t eaten any lunch yet, we decided to have some lunch. After which we went to his hotel as he did have Internet in his hotel and I refuse to pay extra for internet in any hotel today. After 15:00 the preregistration started and I helped Andrew “ajh” Hutton with some of build-up of the conference. The pre-Symposium dinner was at the Boathouse, where we had some dinner and drinks, we ended up staying there till the end, where the first rumors about why certain “sponsors” where not present did become apparent, however nobody said anything.
Tuesday, the first day of the conference, Jon Masters started the conference with his opening keynote, State of the Kernel, were he lead us through what happened in the past year regarding kernel development and some upcoming things waiting to happen regarding kernel development. Then I went to the VirtFS talk by Venkateswararao Jujjuri, he spoke about a file system that is aware of virtualization and allows pass-through between hosts and guests systems based on the 9P2000.L and KVM as the hypervisor. After lunch Art Cannon spoke about Open Source Governance and how corporations, in particular IBM, approach open source and his experiences over the years. Christoph Lameter spoke about The Limits of Open Source and how we were not like the ipods/ipads of this world, I have my reservations with what he was talking about. Paul Turner spoke about CPU Bandwidth Limits Under CFS, this focused on how extra CPU shares can cause latency and how a task can consume CPU, while it should be idle. An to close the first day, Bart Trojanowski, gave his tutorial What!? Not using Git yet?, where he explained git in detail, most of what I already knew, as James Bottomley, also gave a talk about git at last year’s MLS. As for dinner, we ended up at a famous pizza place some 30 minutes walking from the hotel, where we eat very good pizza’s. After which we came back into town for a desert BoF and a very small group went for a drinking BoF thereafter.
Wednesday, Kunhoon Baik gave his presentation about Boosting up Embedded Linux devices, where they take a snapshot of a running system as they can then hibernate and get back into the system within 4 seconds. Some impressive features especially for mobile devices. Then Rohit Vijay Dongre gave his presentation about UBI with logging a flash management system, a very interesting talk and topic, however somewhat confusing due to that UBIL an UBIfs have similar names and it was not always as apparent about what was being spoken about. Just before lunch, Oren Laadan gave his presentation about Linux-CR: Transparent Application Checkpoint-Restart in Linux, which boils down to being able to save the state of a running application so you can resume it later, allowing you to do sharing, load balancing and debugging. We went with a bunch of people to lunch at the Highlander, which made me enter the next presentation a little late, Database on Linux in a virtualized environments over NFS by Bikash Roy Choudhury, spoke about running Oracle 11g, the database, on RHEL6 in VM’s on NetApp machines using NFS, I hear about a similar thing with MySQL on the Zarafa Summercamp, where Kernel.org BoF, showing some of the funny emails he gets and then speaking more bout his experience as the BOFH for kernel.org. He demonstrated the new boot.kernel.org feature, allowing you to PXE boot over the internet to a variety of Linux distributions. As last item of the day, I gave my tutorial about How to implement KVM with other guest systems. As dinner we went to a Japanese restaurant, where we did eat sushi, after which there was, as usual, a desert and drinking BoF.
Thursday morning there were some Lighting talks, as it was early morning, I only really remember two talks : one being the one of Randy Appleton, Comparing the Speed of Windows and Linux, a talk that left me with some frustrations, as it seems utter useless, and the data presented seem more something you would do in primary school. However most people did disagree with me and as there was an open slot after lunch, a more in depth version was presented there. The other notable talk was that of Alexandre Lissy about Monitoring scheduling in a Kerrighed cluster talking about the Kerrighed cluster and monitoring of the cluster. After which I went to see Kir Kolyshkin, about Using OpenVZ Linux containers the tutorial explained how to implement OpenVZ and some of the features, benefits and drawbacks of OpenVZ over KVM, Xen and VMWare. Originally most of us wanted to see TwinLinux:Running different Kernels on separate cores of a multicore system by Swapnil Arvind Pimpale, however he was unable to make it. So I went to Zach Pfeffer’s presentation about The Virtual Contiguous Memory Manager, however, due to some hardware error with my laptop, I ended up not paying attention. The next presentation was about Transactional system calls on Linux given by Linux on Mobile Devices – BoF by Tim Riker, where Tim gave an overview of the mobile operating system and looked at the placements of the OS’s within their fields. Last, but definitely not least of the day was the tutorial Multilayer web application security: from SELinux to ModSecurity in which Konstantin Ryabitsev explained the most common and some newer web vulnerabilities and some ways to prevent and secure your system using SELinux, mod_security and briefly mod_suPHP. We went for dinner at the Baton Rouge, not staying to long as I was going to the Whiskey BoF and Andrew’s birthday party.
Friday, the last day of the conference, started later, however some people did not realize this, so the State of Gentoo BoF had a double run, one preschedule and one on schedule, Robin was not that amused. Obviously having to present my own BoF Beyond the Base. The next presentation was by Christoffer Dall about KVM on ARM and as ARM processors do not have built-in VT support of any kind, lightweight paravirtualization is a solution to enable KVM to run on ARM devices like the Android phones. After lunch Vivek Kashyap presented DataCenter Networking: Automating Virtual Machine Network Profiles basically automating profiles based upon port profiles, so that when VM’s migrate from one system to another, their workload remains running as the network migrates based on virtual NIC’s and their physical hosts. Next up before the closing keynote was Ankita Garg with her presentation about Looking Inside Memory – Tooling for tracing memory reference patterns, in which RAM is put into an overview as to understand what happens when applications runs, all this is then plotted into graphs for optimization reasons. In closing Tim Riker, gave the closing keynote titled Android – The Bait and Switch OS, this talk did end up losing a sponsor (more on that later), however Tim gave his experience on how and mainly what he has been doing to get his Vphone, an Android based mobile phone for the US market, to life. He had to jump through some hopes to get the regulators to accept his mobile phone. And he had his share of intercommunication problems with the Chinese on how to produce the phone and why certain features had to be as such. He then had some problems with getting Google to sign off on his phone, as they did not respond to his calls, and finally he demonstrated how to get the open source version of Android and how you can make that work on your hardware. His main appeal was to get more involved and how he is in need of some funding to conclude his story successfully.
The closing party was not held at the Black Thorn as in the past, but at the Museum of Nature, as a final surprise we came to know that due to some sponsor, it would be a dry party, and no this was not a joke, the venue had to be changed at the last minute as the sponsor pulled out at the last minute and there was no time to get a liquor license. Even so we did get into the museum and had some time to visit the museum itself prior to going to the party. The party itself was good, keeping into account that there was booze. However the need did surface and so we went for an unofficial after party at a local nearby cafe. Where we ended up staying quite late.
Saturday is the traditional Hacker Bike Ride by Richard Guy “rgb” Briggs, who is a very know bike hacker. However as I needed to catch my train around noon, I could again not enjoy this BoF or the BBQ. At noon I caught the bus to my train, then the train to Montreal, and the the flight back to Brussels.
Now for sponsors, there were many who sponsored this event, whom we have to thank, like Nav Canada, QualComm, OpenInventionNetwork, Credil and Cisco. Now looking at these names many usual big players are missing. I am not going to go into the politics, as this might end up getting some people into trouble. However pulling out of your sponsorship 2 to 3 weeks before an event, WILL cause you some bad will even though you may be the biggest search engine on the planet, especially if you have read in between the lines and now release about who and/or whom we are talking. Another question is why so many usual sponsors are now not supporting this event, nevertheless they are supporting others. Has OLS lost it’s charm, if so, you might want to talk with Andrew, or is their a conspiracy to let it die a slow dead.
As for next year, there will be a next year as far as I have heard and understood, so keep some budget and time free to attend.
