Why You Should Attend LinuxCon Europe: My Top Five Sessions

Earlier this week we published the full schedule for LinuxCon Europe and Embedded Linux Conference Europe. In many ways, I think the technical content for LinuxCon Europe may be the best collection of speakers we’ve ever had. I wonder if the location in Barcelona has anything to do with that….

Here are my top five favorite sessions:

— The Linux Kernel Report from LWN.net editor Jon Corbet. Get a peak into the future of the kernel from Jon. 

— “Don’t Play Dice with Random Numbers” from Intel’s H. Peter Anvin. Linux contains a sophisticated system to make randomness available to the kernel and applications, but it has limitations.  This talk will examine the applications of random numbers, the Linux random number subsystems, how to correctly write an application that requires random numbers, and how to configure a system to avoid random-number-related security or performance problems.

— “Trawler: A New Approach to SSD Caching” from Hannes Reinecke of SUSE Labs. In this talk Hannes will present a new approach for SSD caching by using a filesystem on the SSD and filesystem notifications via fanotify to maintain consistency with the underlying filesystem.

— “Scaling an Open Source Community: How we grew Open Stack” from Monty Taylor of HP. OpenStack started off as one of the fastest growing Open Source projects around. While that’s extremely exciting, it’s also the type of growth that can derail projects if they aren’t prepared for it. From day one,  we had to set up for success and plan for problems before the arose. How we did it is interesting enough, but understanding why we made the choices we made will go a long way to understanding how to grow other projects through similar times.

— “Optimizing File System Performance When Memory is Tight” from Google (and Linux Foundation fellow) Ted Ts’o. File systems benchmarks are often run on a system with nothing else is running, and when there is plenty of memory available.  Unfortunately,this is often not how file systems are used in many systems — in particular, in virtualization and/or in “”cloud servers””, were a largenumber of virtual machines or jobs are packed onto a single physical server in order to make the utilization numbers required by a typicalcloud business plan.

Our keynote line up is varied and strong this year with talks from the CTO of Evernote, the CEO of Eucalyptus, the founder of Ubuntu, the CTO of Red Hat and more. I didn’t list it in my top five but of course it is: a conversation between Linus Torvalds and Intel’s Dirk Hondel. These two friends and long term collaborators will make for a lively conversation. Afterwards, we should also have fun exploring the streets of Barcelona. Here’s another top ten list we may find handy. If you register before tomorrow it’s only $350 to attend both conferences (plus the CloudOpen Summit). Hope to see you all there!