LinuxCon Europe 2013 Schedule – Web Technologies, Debugging Techniques, Wayland, and More

I’ve just received an email from the Linux Foundation saying the schedule for LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe 2013 had been made available. The conference will take place for 3 days (October 21-23, 2013) in the Edinburgh International Conference Center, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. There will be over 100 conference sessions, and several co-located events including: Automotive Linux Summit, the Embedded Linux Conference, Gluster Workshop, KVM Forum, Tizen Summit, Xen Project Developer Summit.

As I’ve recently done with LinuxCon North America 2013 and ARM TechCon 2013, I’ll make a virtual schedule with selected developer sessions using the event’s schedule builder. You may find out several sessions will also be given in LinuxCon North America.

Monday – 21st of October

• 11:00 – 11:50 – Bluetooth Smart Devices and Low Energy Support on Linux by João Paulo Rechi Vita, INdT

This presentation will cover a brief introduction on how the Bluetooth Low Energy technology works. Then it will present the current status of its support on Linux, including the profiles we’re currently working on what can be expected to be finished on the near future. The currently available APIs and how to interact with Bluetooth Smart devices will be shown and there will be a few demos of Bluetooth Smart devices working with Linux.

• 12:00 – 12:50 – A Deep Look Into WebEngines: From the GET Request Up to the Screen Pixel by Adenilson Cavalcanti, Samsung Research America

Web Browsers are quickly becoming the most frequently used individual application in any modern desktop, following the same trend in mobile devices. They are growing in capabilities and performance, enabling an era of new webapps ranging from email to vehicle navigation and games. Current browsers are powerful enough to run even the Linux kernel in a Javascript PC emulator. Browsers are enabled by web engines, but have you ever questioned how they work? The objective of this talk is to present how a modern web engine works, following the several steps from the first user input to access a webpage up to the moment where content is rendered in the screen. Topics like multiprocess browser architecture, process sandboxing, content parsing and rendering will be covered. The web engine used for the discussion will be WebKit, with some examples drawn from Blink and Gecko.

• 14:20 – 15:10 – Recent Advances in Linux Tracing by Elena Zannoni, Oracle

The many tracing tools available on Linux today provide a wide array of choices for the users. Deciding which of them to use to diagnose system problems on production systems can prove challenging. Various tools have various states of integration within the Linux kernel, and also within different Linux distributions. Bleeding edge features are often just being merged into the upstream Linux kernel. It takes often a long time for such features to be incorporated in commercial distributions. The required set up for the tools and their level of usability also vary significantly. This talk will cover the more popular and actively developed tracing areas focusing on their latest updates and will describe the infrastructure they rely on. An overview of the tracing tools (ftrace, perf, systemtap, DTrace for Linux, etc) will be included with some examples of usage of each.

• 15:20 – 16:10 – New Technology:HTML5 by Hisashi Hashimoto, Hitachi

HTML5 is going to be used widely because of its powerful specification. A lot of browsers are now supporting HTML5. It is a new technology, so that currently only few engineers can use this technology. Needs of such skillful engineers are urgent and necessary from the point of Industry, such as automotive and others. We started the development of the certification program of HTML5 skill set. The purpose of this program is to encourage engineers to learn and and improve their skill set, and increase number of skillful engineers. In this presentation, I will provide why we started this program, how we develop, and time-frame.

• 16:40 – 17:30 – Lessons from Contributing to WebKit and Blink by Bruno de Oliveira Abinader, Samsung Electronics

Being one of the most successful open source projects to date, WebKit development process consists of a series of protocols and strict policies in order to obtain committer and reviewer status. Blink follows a similar approach with committers and scoped code owners, in a similar fashion as Linux Kernel does with its subsystem maintainers. Their open source success is due to not only solid support from major technology companies, but also to the high quality and automated testing performed on patches before submission. In this presentation, Bruno explains how the development process of both WebKit and Blink projects are – from submitting well-tested patches with strict policies to check, get review from community, and commit upstream via commit-queue system (including early warning system bots). This is a very practical talk with live demonstrations of patch submissions on both projects.

Tuesday – 22nd of October

• 11:10 – 12:00 – Identifying Kernel Messages in Low Cost by Hidehiro Kawai, Hitachi

Most of the kernel messages would be intended to know developers what’s going on in the kernel, and they tend to be not friendly to users and machines. To improve this, Hidehiro Kawai is trying to add hash value for each kernel message to identify them easily. If this feature becomes available, users can consult external manuals by feeding the hash and know detailed information. Or a monitor tool can identify specific message in low overhead and trigger a fail-over or collect related information automatically. In this presentation, he explains the implementation of the first RFC patch set, on-going discussions (if there are), and how utilizing the feature in user space, while introducing a similar challenge 5 years ago and how addressed its objections.

• 12:10 – 13:00 – EFL on Wayland by Rafael Antognolli, Intel

The Wayland project is growing fast, as well as its adoption by several toolkits. EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) specifically has a Wayland backend being actively developed over the last 2 years, with its latest features being already incorporated. EFL developers are also contributing back to the Wayland project itself, helping to improve the protocol and implementation, from a toolkit point of view. This talk will present the current development state of the Wayland backend of EFL, describing the latest incorporated features. It will also present the changes that this port has passed since the beginning of its development, and its improvements so far. A comparison to the other EFL backends will be done, as well as future plans for Wayland on EFL and the Enlightenment Window Manager.

• 14:30 – 15:20 – Wayland/X Compositor Architecture By Example: Enlightenment E19 by Mike Blumenkrantz, Samsung Electronics

Window managers and desktop environments in the Open Source community number in the dozens, but only a small number of those include compositors; fewer still can boast that they run seamlessly on embedded devices or in Wayland. Enlightenment is so flexible that it was chosen by Samsung to be to window manager for their new Linux-based mobile operating system, Tizen, in addition to being used by tens of thousands of users worldwide for over a decade. With the current development of E19, it’s time to take a step back and look at the main feature: compositor design. This presentation will give a brief introduction to compositing and window management before jumping directly into the history of Enlightenment’s compositor architecture and its progression to the current state of full Wayland and X support.

• 15:50 – 16:40 – The Kernel Report by Jonathan Corbet, LWN.net

The 2013 version of this popular talk describing the current state of kernel development and where it can be expected to go in the near future. There will be some technical content, but this talk is highly accessible to non-technical participants as well.

• 16:50 – 17:40 – Hunting Down Data Races in the Linux Kernel by Eugene A. Shatokhin, ROSA

Concurrency issues in the software, and data races in particular, may have devastating effects but are often quite hard to reveal. Hunting down such problems is especially important for the Linux kernel, which is inherently concurrent. Although there is a variety of tools to help reveal data races in the user-space code (Helgrind, DRD, ThreadSanitizer, etc.), there are only a few that can be applied to the kernel. In his presentation, Eugene Shatokhin will give an overview of such tools and the techniques they rely upon. Among other things, he will present KernelStrider, a component of KEDR Framework that collects data about the operation of the kernel modules in runtime. The data are then analyzed by an “offline” detector in the user-space to actually reveal the races. The results obtained so far as well as possible directions of future development will also be discussed.

Wednesday – 23rd of October

• 11:05 – 11:55 – Enjoy Fighting Regressions with git bisect by Christian Couder

“git bisect” is a command that is part of the Git distributed version control system. This command enables software users, developers and testers to easily find the commit that introduced a regression. This is done by performing a kind of binary search between a known good and a known bad commit. git bisect supports both a manual and an automated mode. The automated mode uses a test script or command.People are very happy with automated bisection, because it saves them a lot of time, it makes it easy and worthwhile for them to improve their test suite, and overall it efficiently improves software quality.

• 12:05 – 12:55 – Recent Developments in GFS2 by Steven Whitehouse, Red Hat

The GFS2 cluster filesystem has been under development for a number of years, however there has been no up-to-date presentation covering all of the latest features since OLS 2007. The intent of this talk is to provide an overview of the current feature set, noting recent significant developments, as well as an introduction into the major algorithms of GFS2 for those less familiar with its capabilities. During the development process, many lessons were learned which would apply equally to any open source project, and these will be discussed too.

• 14:30 – 15:20 – Qt Project – 2 Years Later by Thiago Macieira, Intel Corp.

October 21, 2013 marks the Qt Project’s second anniversary. Launched in 2011 to be the home of the Qt libraries and frameworks under Open Source Governance, the Qt Project has seen quite a lot of change in these 2 years., good and bad. It lost its main sponsor and many doubted the project would continue, but it did, and it managed to release the first major release in 7 years (5.0), one more feature release and half a dozen patch releases. This presentation will review the principles of the project’s governance, who the contributors are and how they work, the major changes that happened in the past two years and how they’ve influenced the project. It will explore the development process from patch to release and to maintenance / bug fixing, and will also show how non-code contributors participate.

• 15:50 – 17:40 – (Tutorial) Hands-On Tutorial on Scalability with Userspace RCU by Mathieu Desnoyers, EfficiOS Inc.

As the number of cores in systems steadily increases, you may find that the good old mutual exclusion synchronization is not sufficient to let your application use more cores not only for heat generation, but primarily for effective computing. The Userspace RCU library implements Read-Copy Update (RCU) synchronization and various lock-free data structures that allow user-space applications to leverage very lightweight synchronization across cores. It allows a broad range of demanding applications to scale to large numbers of cores. This library is released under LGPL v2.1, so it can be used by all applications. This tutorial will walk the audience through the basics of Read-Copy Update, and then through the synchronization and data structure APIs exposed by Userspace RCU.

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