Linaro Connect Asia 2013 Sessions and Mini-Summits

Linaro Connect Asia 2013 (LCA13) will take place in Hong Kong again this year, on March 4 – 8, 2013 at the Gold Coast Hotel. Linaro recently published the event schedule, with sessions focused on kernel, power management, toolchain, graphics and multimedia, platform, validation, and QA tracks, as well as 2 mini-summits: Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) which will discuss about ARM server, and an as-yet-unannounced group (Linaro Networking Group?) within Linaro. There will also be hacking sessions each day (except on “Demo Friday”) where you can certainly expect to learn many useful skills/tips.

I’ve selected 2 sessions or keynotes per day that I think could be especially interesting. Some of the sessions don’t have description yet, so even if they might seem interesting I’ve usually skipped those.

Monday

12:00 – 13:00 – Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) Update

The Toolchain Working Group started working on LLVM in January 2013. Come and meet the team, hear about the progress we have made so far, and discuss what topics the team should be investigating in the future.

14:00 – 15:00 – Upstreaming 101

Upstreaming 101 is Linaro’s popular introduction to upstreaming session that covers the basics of how to get involved with the Linux kernel community. This training will cover high level technical and social concepts related to working in the open and is aimed at technical leads, engineers, and engineering managers.

Tuesday

09:00 – 10:00 – ARM Enterprise Server Mini-Summit: UEFI

Updates on the maintainership rules, Linaro tree, SCT and test integration in LAVA, collaboration with ARM and the Tianocore community.

10:00 – 11:00 – Demo: big.LITTLE IKS and MP

Wednesday

08:30 – 09:00 – Keynote: Greg Kroah-Hartman (Linux Foundation)

09:00 – 10:00 – Networking Mini-Summit: PREEMPT_RT

PREEMPT_RT is a set of maintained kernel patches. Historically, ARM platform support has ‘bit-rotted’ over time; there being a lack of ongoing testing and maintenance. As well as adding features, we need to bring PREEMPT_RT into a continuous integration loop.

Platforms

TBD (but the Cortex-A15 patches were done with ARM’s TC2)
Use Open Embedded stack?

Thursday

09:00 – 10:00 – Single zImage/Consolidation: What Comes Next?

Determine next steps and priorities to get single zImage work completed across member platforms by Linaro Connect Europe 2013.

12:00 – 13:00 – Optimizing Mesa for ARM using LLVMpipe & NEON

Mesa is found in both Android and Linux as the library that implements OpenGL ES the 3D graphics standard. The goal of this session is to discuss and reach consensus on potential optimizations for Mesa.

LLVMpipe is (at this moment) a highly intel focused gallium 3d driver which utilizes llvm in place of the slower standard software pipe. It takes advantage of multiple CPU cores. The driver is functional on ARM however it’s not been tuned in any way.

Friday

10:00 – 11:00 – KVM Status and Plans

Review KVM status and plans for A15 and v8 architectures, IO visualization and OpenStack as a test case.

12:00 – 13:00 – OpenGL ES3 (GLES3)

OpenGL ES3, the 3rd version of the Khronos embedded standard was released in August of 2012. The first implementations are starting to see the light of day. Intel has aggressively moved forward to implement OpenGL ES 3 as part of Mesa 9.1 and has submitted it for certification, a first for Mesa.

The goals of this session are:

Gather member requirements for Open GL ES 3 features.
Discuss proposed implementation activity in Mesa.
Review piglit test framework

How to Attend LCA13

I understand registration is free for Linaro and members attendees, but anybody else can also attend for £495.00 (+£23.83 fee). It’s also possible to attend remotely (for free) by viewing a live stream of the sessions using Google+ Hangouts on Air. If you missed it, it’s still possible to view the sessions on-demand at anytime. However, if it is the same as previous Linaro Connect, I found the audio to be pretty terrible, and the camera is setup in a way that makes it difficult to read the slides.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.