LinuxCon North America 2013 Schedule

LinuxCon (North America) 2013 will take place on September 16 – 18, 2013 in New Orleans, LA. The event will be co-located with several other conferences: the Linux Plumbers Conference, the Xen Project User Summit, the OpenDaylight Mini-Summit, the Gluster Workshop 2013, the UEFI Plugfest, the Linux Wireless Summit, the Linux Security Summit, and CloudOpen 2013.

LinuxCon consists of 3 days of keynotes, and legal, operations, and developers related sessions as well as tutorials and workshops. There will be around 150 sessions and keynotes during those 3 days. I’ve gone through developer sessions and selected one for each time period.

Monday, September 16

10:35 – 11:25 – UEFI and Linux by Kirk Bresniker, HP

UEFI has become ubiquitous on the PC client systems and is coming up on servers and ARM-based systems, it is becoming the converged firmware infrastructure. UEFI Secure Boot feature has attracted a lot of attention from the Linux community. Linux distros and Linux Foundation have found solutions. This presentation provides a review of the motivations behind the creation of the UEFI technology, the history, the current status, and the future. It provides an update on the new significant developments since the publication of UEFI Spec v2.3.1C last June. It also serves as a venue for Q&A with the Linux community.

11:35 – 12:35 – LLVMLinux: The Linux Kernel with Dragon Wings by Behan Webster, Converse in Code Inc.

The LLVM project is an extensive compiler technology suite which is becoming commonplace in many industries. Technology built with LLVM is already shipped in millions of Linux devices as a part of Android/Renderscript. Increasingly it is becoming a big part of the development process for embedded projects, all the way up through to high performance computing clusters. This session will provide an update on the status of the LLVMLinux project; a project which is cooperating with both the Linux kernel and LLVM communities to build the Linux kernel with Clang/LLVM.

15:10 – 16:00 – Linux Transparent Memory Compression by Seth Jennings, IBM

Memory compression has long been a topic confined to academic research and development sandboxes. However, with CPU and memory speed improvements outpacing improvements in I/O speed and latency, memory compression is now being deemed a viable way to increase in-memory data density and delaying or avoiding costly I/O. Zswap, a feature for compressed swap caching, merged into the kernel in v3.11, is a first step toward deploying this functionality in the Linux kernel.

This presentation targets users who own hardware with maxed-out RAM capacities or pay per-GB for RAM usage (IaaS customers) and would like to determine if memory compression can reduce their costs and extend the useful lifetime of their computing assets.

16:10 – 17:00 – 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, presenting the available APIs and how to interact with Bluetooth Smart devices, including the profiles we’re currently working on, and what can be expected to be finished in the near future. There will be also a few demos of Bluetooth Smart devices working with Linux.

17:10pm – 18:00 – Enabling Mobile Payments on Linux by Samuel Ortiz, Intel

With the Linux kernel now supporting NFC, a natural step forward seems to be enabling mobile payments, either cloud or NFC based. To do so we need to give payment applications access to secure elements, via the kernel. At the moment, both the secure element kernel interface and a generic secure element library are missing from any standard Linux distribution, effectively keeping Linux away from the mobile payments market. We will first go through a brief tour of the mobile payments ecosystem and see how it is actually implemented. Then we will describe the proposed kernel APIs for discovering, enabling and talking to secure elements. Finally we will discuss about the possible options for bringing a hardware agnostic secure element library to standard Linux distributions, and how it could be used to implement payment applications on Linux.

Tuesday, September 17

10:45 – 11:35 – Kernel CI Using Linaro’s Automated Validation Architecture by Tyler Baker, Linaro

Linaro’s open source automated validation architecture (LAVA) enables developers to test their software on a broad range of hardware platforms. This presentation will describe to developers how they can utilize LAVA to test and validate kernels on real or emulated hardware. This session will showcase a new lightweight interface for testing kernels efficiently, and displaying test results. The goal being that we as developers can leverage automation to ensure that the Linux kernel is well tested and that each iteration becomes more robust than the last

11:45 – 12:35 – Successful Development Begins with the Heart of the Device by Leon Farasati, Qualcomm

Mobile processors are at the heart of hundreds of devices built on the Linux kernel, but are also being implemented in other Linux-compatible embedded systems. For the Linux community, it’s inevitable that challenges will arise when developing and pinpointing the origin of issues can be a setback. Leon will talk about tools that enable developers to test and refine systems and applications for these powerful mobile processors so the software runs pristinely when launched.

The target audience for this session is software developers, mobile and beyond. Developers can expect to learn how to test and fine tune applications across embedded systems to be not only be functional and problem free, but also visually enticing, battery efficient and packed with cutting-edge features.

15:10 – 16:00 – Efficient Memory Management on Mobile Devices by Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz, Samsung

With raising popularity of Linux on mobile devices the shortcomings of the default kernel memory management policies become more and more visible. The combination of limited physical memory and lack of swap device brings a challenge in the most efficient use of the available resources. This presentation will give an overview of the current state of improvements (i.e. memory control groups, per-process/group reclaim, memory compression) to the Linux memory management subsystem that together with the cooperating user-space components allow more custom control of the memory available in the system. The usage examples of specific features will be based on Tizen operating system.

This talk is intented mainly at kernel and distribution developers wishing to improve Linux memory management but it may be interesting to whoever would like to know more about the topic.

16:10 – 17:00 – Tux3 Progress Report: Towards a New General Purpose Filesystem for Linux by Daniel Phillips, Samsung

The Tux3 filesystem project began in 2008 and has now reached a point where it is beginning to show favorable benchmark results compared to other Linux filesystems. Tux3 breaks new ground in Linux filesystem technology with its strong consistency semantics, novel high performance atomic commit and asynchronous frontend/backend design that maps well to the new generation of multi-core CPUs. Tux3 is expected to reach a mergable state in the next few months. Much work remains to be done, including incorporating versioning and replication support, improved filesystem checking and repair facilities, enterprise features such as quotas and end to end checksumming, and availability features such as online checking and repair. In this talk, Daniel Phillips, designer of Tux3, will discuss current implementation status, present benchmark results and lay out plans for kernel merge and beyond.

17:10 – 18:00 – Collaborative GPL Compliance Through Non-Profit Entities by Bradley M. Kuhn, Software Freedom Conservancy

Software Freedom Conservancy announced last year a renewed effort for cross-project collaborative GPL compliance efforts, including copyright holders from BusyBox, Linux, and Samba. Conservancy uses an internal system of communication and collaboration to take input from stakeholders to discuss and engage in compliance activity to ensure compliance with the GPL throughout the technology industry and particularly in the embedded device market. Compliance with the GPL is the responsibility of copyright holders of the software, and Conservancy helps those copyright holders pursue the work, so those developers can focus on coding. In this talk, the Executive Director of Conservancy will discuss how Conservancy handles compliance matters, what matters it focuses on, and how the copyright holders that work with Conservancy engage in a collaborative effort to ensure compliance with the GPL.

Wednesday, September 18

10:50 – 12:40 – (Tutorial) Cross-Compiling Linux Kernels on x86_64: A Tutorial on How to Get Started by Shuah Khan, Samsung

The Linux Kernel is currently supported on over 30+ different hardware architectures. This is a huge benefit for Linux adoption on a wide range of deployments. However, the ability to build and test Linux kernels on all possible supported architectures requires having access to such test systems for each of these architectures which is not easy by any means. Therefore, the ability to cross-compile non-native architectures on an architecture that is widely supported such as the x86_64 helps address the building kernels part of the problem.

This talk will present the details of where to find cross-compilers packages for architectures, how to install them, and how to automate compile on each of these architectures on an x86 system. This talk will be of great benefit to any software developer trying to build and test Linux kernel on non-native hardware architecture.

14:00pm – 14:50 – UEFI and ACPI for ARM by Graeme Gregory, Linaro

As ARM and ARM64 move out of gadgets and into more PC like hardware, there has been an increasing demand for the same tools to manage these devices as already exists in x86 world. Linaro has been working on UEFI and ACPI on arm/arm64 hardware and this talk is a summary of the current status of the work and the direction that will be taken in the future. We will show the areas of change to the ARM platform boot sequence, change to the ACPI core code, and change to drivers to support ACPI.

15:00 – 15:50 – Power Management in the Linux Kernel – Current Status and Future by Rafael J. Wysocki, Intel OTC

The Linux kernel contains multiple energy-saving features. Some of them act on the system as a whole while the others are concerned with individual processors or I/O devices. The majority of them have been developed in isolation and they work reasonably well individually, but that is often insufficient to address problems related to the progressing integration of hardware and growing user expectations. For this reason, it will be necessary to make them work more closely together and he’s going to talk about that in his presentation. Rafael will describe the current status of the kernel’s energy-saving features, the most important problems they are facing and some possible ways to address those problems

16:00pm – 16:50 – Embedded Linux Kernel Testing BoF by Tsugikazu Shibata, NEC and Hisao Munakata, Renesas

This session is a BoF session organized by LTSI (Long Term Support Initiative) to discuss testing for Linux kernel. Testing is very important when delivering software, validating changes, shipping products and so on but actually each individual is doing its own testing and that are not shared with others. This BoF would like to discuss how to share testing, what is the common testing portion and so on.

Those are just a few choices, and you can check the full schedule to find out which sessions suit you best.

You can register to LinuxCon 2013 and CloudOpen 2013 online for the following fees:

~~US$475 through May 3rd (Early Bird)~~
~~US$575 May 4th through July 31st (Standard)~~
US$675 thereafter (Late)
Student Registration – $150

Fees are up between 11% to 50% compared to last year. Who said there’s no inflation?

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.