Looking forward to the kernel summit

The 2009 Kernel Summit will be held October 19 and 20 in Tokyo, Japan, immediately prior to the Japan Linux Symposium. This will be the first time that the Summit has been held in Asia. If nothing else, the sight of that many kernel hackers running loose in Akihabara should be amusing.

The draft agenda for the event has been posted; as usual, it gives an insight into the kinds of problems which are seen to be pressing at this time. Following the tradition of the last few years, the Summit is spending a relatively small amount of time on specific technical issues; that kind of problem is usually best solved on the mailing lists and with code. What face-to-face meetings are often best for, instead, is process-oriented issues.

The agenda this time contains a panel consisting of (unnamed, thus far) end users from both the embedded and enterprise communities. Enterprise representatives have been fairly common participants at these meetings, but the presence of the embedded user community is new. With any luck, this panel will encourage the trend whereby embedded systems vendors are participating more in the development process. On the second day, instead, the Summit will hear from a user not normally associated with embedded systems: there will be a session on Google's use of Linux and problems which have been encountered.

Another process-oriented session is the perennial "regressions and kernel quality" topic. A separate session looks at performance regressions in particular; it's likely to follow up on a similar discussion held during the kernel developers' panel at LinuxCon. There's also sessions on how linux-next and the staging tree work, and an open session on improving the development process.

On the technical side, the summit begins with summary reports from a number of recently-held mini-summits. Perf events and tracing occupy a significant chunk of time; some of that will be dedicated to a demonstration of what can be done with perf, ftrace, and timechart. There will be discussions on expanding the use of the device tree abstraction to other architectures, improving generic architecture support, and the merging of the remaining realtime preemption patches. The "hacking hour," introduced last year, is back; there has been a suggestion that the topic this year could be big kernel lock elimination.

As usual, LWN editor Jonathan Corbet will be there to report on the discussion. Reports will be posted as soon as they are available; stay tuned.

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