The 2015 Kernel Summit

The 2015 Linux Kernel Summit was held October 26-28 in Seoul, South Korea, alongside the Korea Linux Forum. Numerous developers came together to discuss issues of interest to the kernel development community as a whole. This page collects the coverage from that event.

The media minisummit

The only minisummit held this year was for the media subsystem; it happened on October 26. See this report for details on what was discussed there.

The technical day

October 27 was an open day for the discussion of technical topics of general interest; it followed a two-track schedule. Your editor, unsurprisingly, was unable to follow both tracks, so this coverage is not complete. Articles from this day include:

• Running a mainline kernel on a cellphone: why phone handsets run highly patched kernels and what can be done about it.

• Improving (or removing) the kthread freezer. The implementation of the freezer for kernel threads is inconsistent and buggy; it should be fixed. Unless the kernel-thread freezer can just be removed entirely, that is.

• Power-management knobs: many useful power-management features go unused because they are not enabled. Do we need an overall knob to turn on power-efficient operation globally?

• Device dependencies and deferred probing: how to improve the setup of devices that depend on other devices in the system.

• Benchmarking and performance trends: how are we doing with regard to performance regressions, and where are our biggest performance issues now?

• Realtime mainlining: now that the realtime project has funding again, what is the plan for this out-of-tree patch set?

• Security beyond bug fixing; Kees Cook told the assembled developers what can and should be done to increase the security of the kernel.

• Developer workflow security: what practical steps can be made to keep developers' machines secure?

The obligatory unrelated photo

Sunrise in Seoul.

The core day

October 28 was the invitation-only day for core developers and maintainers. Sessions from this day include:

• Kernel testing; various ways of improving automatic testing of the kernel.

• More security discussion and, in particular, whether the kernel community is now more willing to consider merging intrusive security technologies.

• Developer recruitment and outreach: are we bringing in enough new developers, and how can we attract more of them?

• Documentation and the kernel's homegrown documentation-processing tools.

• Restartable sequences; how do we want to support this user-space concurrency mechanism in the kernel?

• Lightning talks: kernel tinification, the year-2038 problem, and out-of-tree code on handsets.

• The stable kernel process: should we make changes to how stable kernels are produced, and what will the next long-term stable kernel be?

• Is Linus happy?: what is the state of the development community, and where is there room for improvement?

The obligatory group photo

Acknowledgments

Your editor would like to thank the Linux Foundation for supporting his travel to the Kernel Summit.

Index entries for this article
Conference	Kernel Summit/2015

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