Inside LinuxCon and CloudOpen 2013, Part Two: More Co-Located Events

We have less than two weeks until LinuxCon and CloudOpen in New Orleans and I can hardly wait. There are a ton of great keynotes, breakout sessions, mini-summits, workshops and parties to choose from. Have you planned your schedule yet?

Hopefully last week’s guide to the Xen Project, OpenDaylight and Tizen mini summits gave you a good start.  In part two of your insider tour of co-located events I’ll give you an overview of what to expect from the Linux Plumbers Conference; Linux Wireless Summit; UEFI Plugfest; and Enea Hacker Day. Other LinuxCon co-located events include the Linux Security Summit and the Gluster Workshop.

It’s not too late to register for LinuxCon and CloudOpen! Visit the LinuxCon North America event page.

Linux Plumbers Conference

Who should attend: Linux kernel and userland developers.

“People normally tend to be working on one piece of something,” said Jes Sorensen, Linux kernel developer and a Plumbers Conference organizer. “The idea of plumbers is to get the different pieces working together.”

What to expect: This is a collection of 13 micro-conferences made up of workshops instead of formal presentations. Developers present a problem and then attendees brainstorm how to approach them. The goal is for each workshop to collectively resolve the issues.

“The idea is to put people in a room and lock the door and throw away the key until they find a solution,” Sorensen said.

Don’t miss: New this year is dedicated time and space for “hack time.” Attendees can go look at code together and work on the problems that are identified.

UEFI Plugfest

Who should attend: Linux developers can show up with any kind of device, software or platform to test UEFI support.

What to expect: It’s a round-robin testing event and it’s the first UEFI plug fest sponsored by the Linux Foundation. Whereas most plug fests are focused on higher level testing, LinuxCon’s will zero in on the firmware level with technical presentations on topics such as making your firmware more secure and the UEFI signing process.

“We’re trying to encourage the Linux community to do more direct testing on UEFI,” said Brian Richardson, a senior technical marketing engineer at Intel.

Don’t miss: A chance to do deeper testing with a platform than you would if you bought it from the store. And you often get a chance to test platforms that are ahead of the market.

“It’s hard to get information on what UEFI does and how support is laid out in Linux,” Richardson said. This is your chance to learn directly from companies such as Intel, Microsoft, HP, Inside Software, Phoenix and AMD.

Linux Wireless Summit

Who should attend: Linux kernel and userland developers working on the Linux wireless subsystem and related technologies.

“There are people using wireless technologies for interesting applications related to security or in kiosks. It’s neat to hear some of those stories,” said John Linville, Linux kernel developer and wireless summit organizer.

What to expect: It’s a mini kernel summit that involves face-to-face discussions on issues that are “awkward or difficult to resolve over email,” Linville said.

Topics will include the ability of bluetooth technologies to use wireless LAN as a physical connection, the interaction between the Bluetooth stack and wireless LAN stack, Android’s unique use of wireless LAN, and miracast video over wireless, among other things. See the full list of topics at wireless.kernel.org.

Don’t miss: The kernel developer discussion on how to bring Android wireless features back into the mainline kernel.

“Just like (Android) had things it did differently from the main kernel, in the wireless space they wanted configuration options the general wireless set didn’t support or didn’t support it the way they needed to,” Linville said. “We’ve been discussing for while how to bring those back in.”

Enea Hacker Day

Who should attend: Anyone who is ready to push their hacking abilities to the limit.  See what amazing things you can invent during a full day free-for-all of innovation!

What to expect: This event will consist of a full day of anything-goes hacking on your favorite embedded target; two speaking sessions from our Enea experts on cutting-edge Linux topics; snacks and lunch; participation giveaways; and an intense techie skill contest with the coveted Grande Geek prize.

Don’t miss: Michael Christofferson, Enea’s Product Marketing Manager speaking on “A Portable clock cycle based performance Measurement System”.  In real-time development, it is often the case that direct, end-to-end time measurements and statistics are needed to determine program, design, or specification correctness. This often involves both kernel events and user space or application events. Christofferson will describe a portable set of open source tools, API’s, and programs for implementation of timing measures between multiple software events based on clock cycles.