Where 2.7 is going by Jonathan Corbet (slides available at: lwn.net. Quite badly sidelined by the “new” working method / numbering scheme. But still an interesting overview of the next years or so.
NFS4 and rpcsec_gss for Linux by J. Bruce Fields. Protocol security not really my cup of tea, here more to see what’s up with NFS4 in general. Server-restart recovery is the key omission in the current (2.6.7-level) implementation. NFS4.1 work has been started (at least on paper, it was not stated whether this was Sun-led or a CITI-effort), the proposed features sound interesting: cluster file system semantics in failovers (with all the needed symmetric state preservation needed), parallel I/O and something called NFS over RDMA. No slides available, but the project homepage packs a lot of information.
TCPfying the Poor Cousins by Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo. An interesting talk about reusing TCP-code in other protocol families to ensure code quality and eliminate special cases from core networking code. DCCP (a new protocol, rather like SCTP) is a proof-of-concept for the process.
Methods to Improve Bootup Time in Linux by Tim R. Bird. First fruits of the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum-initiative. An impressive presentation, that proves that in a constant-hardware environment there are really significant improvements to be gained. The target (having userspace running in 500 milliseconds) is a tough call, but the presenter looked surprisingly hopeful. Execute in Place is helpful, but adds artifacts to delays – partial XIP (hotspots in RAM) a possible solution. There have been multiple .rc script replacements, but true parallelization of scripts is still missing (would need a re-factoring of init)
BoF: Linux Scalability Effort led by Hanna Linder. First birds of a feather-session gets off to a good start by a big bunch of IBM-guys presenting the bottlenecks identified (and in some cases eliminated). dcache, NUMA environments, ckrm discussed – all have issues.
BoF: Hardware error Reporting, Handling, Debugging led by Robert Hentosh. Hardware debuggers thought to be the best way to approach debugging, but that’s only available in lab-environment. Key issue is to provide enough information runtime to resolve any issues in post mortem-fashion. NMI is a totally inadequate solution (it has very little payload), and machine checks are slowly replacing it in modern CPU architectures (which does not help the zillions of installed x86-base at all).
Exchanged the frame-challenged Shrek to Once upon a Time in the West at HMV.
It’s getting hotter. Decided to have dinner at Subway, since the AMD-party’s bound to have snacks.
And the party indeed had food. Of finger kind, but decent nonetheless. A very long-winded presentation having nothing to do with Linux, AMD or pretty much anything else. No-one I knew won anything in the lottery (some quality HW was dished out).
Stopped by Boland’s on the way to the hotel. DNS still acting up, e-mail less existence is not painful at all.