The Linux Plumbers Conference: a summary

Back in the early days of Linux, a developer wishing to meet his or her peers at a conference had a relatively small number of alternatives. Two of those - Linux Expo and the Atlanta Linux Showcase - were held in the United States. But it has been a long time since the US has hosted a serious developer-oriented conference - especially for developers who are working on the lower layers of the system. The US-based conferences died out as a result of a combination of a number of factors, including poor management, competition from the Ottawa Linux Symposium and (yes, really) LinuxWorld, and a feeling among certain developers that becoming the next Dmitry Sklyarov would not be a fun way to spend the rest of the year.

There is a certain appeal to overseas events, but that appeal fades more quickly than one might expect. The need for long-haul travel also excludes US-based developers who are unable to arrange funding. So, for some years, the development community in the US has been wishing for a local conference. More recently, a dedicated group of Portland-based developers led by Kristen Carlson Accardi, with some help from the Linux Foundation, decided to do something about it. The result was the first edition of the Linux Plumbers Conference, held September 17 to 19. Staging this conference in a world which does not lack for conferences was a bit of a risk, and the organizers added a few risks of their own to the mix. Looking back, your editor can say that those risks were well repaid; the first Linux Plumbers Conference was a great success.

The "plumbing" focus of this event was well chosen. While it is still possible to run a system with a bare kernel and a shell as the init process, Linux systems used for real work increasingly have a layer of user-space software tightly wrapped around the kernel. Quite a bit of kernel-based functionality only works properly in the presence of a tightly-coupled user-space component; examples include system initialization, 3D graphics, and much more. The kernel, along with its collection of user-space software, makes up the "plumbing" layer which makes everything else work. Kernel developers have had ample opportunities to get together in recent years, but there has been no concerted effort to bring together the developers for the full plumbing layer until now.

The other significant change made by the LPC organizers was to do away with the "everybody delivers a paper" format used by most conferences. Instead, the conference was planned as a series of 2.5-hour "microconferences," each with a specific focus. Each microconference, which had its own "runner," was able to select its own mode of operation. They generally included a certain number of presentations on relevant topics; in this sense, the microconferences resemble the topic-specific tracks found at many academic gatherings.

Where things differ, though, is that most of the microconferences were explicitly oriented toward discussion and problem solving. The best speakers did not (just) talk about their own project; they raised challenges for the group as a whole to address. It worked spectacularly well. Throughout the event, your editor saw rooms full of people who were fully engaged in the work at hand. The discussions had wide participation, most of the necessary people were generally in the room, and there were relatively few bored people checking email. And, most importantly, a lot of real work got done. Developers came out of the sessions with a clear idea of what needs to be done, agreement with others on how it was to be done, and, sometimes, working code.

So, what did all of these developers talk about?

• Developers interested in storage talked about the iogrind tool and a number of outstanding problems; some notes from the session have been posted.

• The Audio microconference covered a wide range of issues; see this LWN article for a summary.

• A session on tracing saw presentations by developers of a number of competing technologies, followed by a focused effort to design a unified low-level shared relay buffer.

• The video input session, for all practical purposes, continued on and off through the entire conference; that group of developers, which had never met before, set in motion some major redesign efforts for the Video4Linux layer.

• The bootstrap and initialization session was dominated by Arjan van de Ven's five-second boot demonstration; having been given that challenge, developers from multiple distributions set about the task of getting their systems to boot quickly.

• A session on server management looked for solutions to a number of challenges facing Linux administrators.

• Kernel/user-space APIs were the topic of another lively session which, while perhaps concluding little, raised a lot of issues on how those APIs should be designed.

• The power management session concluded that the suspend/resume problem is solved ("if you disagree, you bought the wrong hardware") and made progress on a number of other problems; now, they say, all that is left is the coding.

• The "future displays" session pounded out the path toward kernel-based graphics mode setting and quite a bit more.

• And the desktop integration session, while reaching "not a lot of conclusions," examined a number of relevant issues; the discussion on Upstart from that session will be covered here separately.

Beyond that, LPC attendees could choose from a handful of more traditional presentations, a provocative keynote from Greg Kroah-Hartman, a rather less provocative kernel update from your editor, a git tutorial taught by some guy named Linus, and no shortage of evening celebrations. All told, the Linux Plumbers Conference was one of the most productive, interesting, and generally worthwhile events your editor has been to in quite some time - and your editor has been to rather more than the usual number of events. There will be a lot of interesting developments kicked off by this gathering, once the exhausted attendees get some rest. This conference is off to a good start.

And it is just a start; the organizers are already working on the 2009 edition. It will, once again, be held in Portland. The general format will likely remain the same, but there will be no kernel summit before the 2009 event (the summit will be in October 2009 in Tokyo). Instead, there is a reasonable chance that a more traditional, presentation-oriented conference will be planned to coincide with the 2009 Plumbers Conference. With this new event, the active local community, and the success of this year's conference, LPC2009 looks promising already.

After 2009, the Plumbers team hopes to take a page from the linux.conf.au playbook and pass the event onto a new set of volunteer organizers somewhere else in North America. This form of organization has helped to keep linux.conf.au vital and interesting for many years; it makes sense to do something similar with the Linux Plumbers Conference. Now might be a good time for any North American community which would like to host this event in 2010 to start thinking about how it could be done.

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