A tale of two conferences

LinuxCon Europe

LinuxCon Europe was held in Berlin this year, colocated with ContainerCon and who knows what else (it's worth noting that these conferences will soon be rebranded into the "Open Source Summit"). It was a large event, with well over 1,000 attendees. As is generally the case with Linux Foundation events, it was impeccably organized and generally busy, with nearly a dozen tracks running simultaneously.

Early LinuxCon events featured a fair amount of low-level technical content, and there was a strong focus on kernel-related topics. Kernel developers were well represented in the audience and tended to receive a fair amount of attention. At LinuxCon Europe 2016, instead, there was no kernel panel, relatively little kernel-related content, and it seems fair to say that most of the attendees didn't know who the few kernel developers present at the event were. Their attention was elsewhere.

Eleven of the talks at this event featured "orchestration" in their titles; 39 mentioned containers, 30 mentioned Docker, and there were nine on Kubernetes. It seems pretty clear that containers are where a lot of the action is at the moment. Perhaps this is a way of saying that, to a great extent, the problems at the lower levels of the system have been solved, so the interesting things to work on are higher up the stack. Or, at least, there is perceived to be more money higher up the stack.

Meanwhile, 17 talks mentioned the kernel, so all is not lost for those of us who are more drawn to lower-level code. One high point was the "Outreachy internship report", where Shraddha Barke, Ioana Ciornei, Cristina Moraru, Ksenija Stanojević, and Janani Ravichandran presented the work they had done during their internships. It was an exercise in optimistic and youthful development energy in general. But your editor also realized, while sitting in the room, that he had never before been in the presence of that many female kernel developers at the same time. That is a sad reflection of the state of the kernel development community, but also a hopeful sign that, maybe, things can get better.

All told, LinuxCon was an intensive and interesting event and a worthwhile snapshot of where at least a part of our community is heading. But, while one is in the middle of the crowds, the overtly commercial keynotes, the show floor, etc., it's sometimes hard not to miss the kind of event we used to have. Linux conferences were once less slick and more focused on the code. What we have in LinuxCon is good, but there is more to our community than what is on offer there.

Kernel Recipes

The week prior to LinuxCon, your editor was fortunate enough to attend Kernel Recipes in Paris. This is the fifth year that this event has been run, but the first time that LWN has been able to be there. This event is a breath of fresh air for anybody who finds the LinuxCon scene to be a bit overwhelming at times.

Kernel Recipes is, at its heart, a three-day gathering for developers to sit down and talk about kernel-related topics. While LinuxCon had a dozen tracks, Kernel Recipes features exactly one. Everybody is in the same room, and, from what your editor saw, all the attendees made a point of being there for the entire event. The conference has a limit of 100 attendees — a limit that was hit in less than two days this year. Each session was a discussion, with wide participation throughout the room. The overall level of engagement was high.

It seems certain that new and interesting work will be inspired by the discussions that happened here. So in that sense, if no other, Kernel Recipes must be seen to be a successful event. The keys to this kind of success would appear to be keeping the size small and a relentless focus on bringing in high-quality talks. Your editor, who sometimes needed prodding to confirm and prepare for his presence there, can attest to the relentless part.

The "small" criterion can be a bit of a problem since it, naturally, limits the number of people who can participate in this kind of event. The Linux Plumbers Conference (now just a few weeks away) is always trying to find the right balance between size and quality of the event, and there, too, tickets tend to sell out quickly. The nice thing about an event like Kernel Recipes, though, is that it ought to be reproducible in other parts of the world. We have a ready supply of good speakers and interesting things to talk about in our community, and it doesn't take that many speakers to make an event like this work.

In the end, it was a privilege to be able to attend both events. Your editor's only regret was being unable to stay in Berlin for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe the following week. Conferences are an opportunity to get a sense for what is happening in our community and to renew one's enthusiasm and energy; both LinuxCon and Kernel Recipes succeeded on all of those fronts. A diverse community needs a diverse range of events; happily, that is just what was in store in Europe during these weeks.