Videos: 10 Interesting Technical Talks from LinuxConf.Au 2015

Many Linux and open source leaders gave presentations at LinuxConf.Au 2015 a few weeks ago, including Linux Creator Linus Torvalds. All of the conference videos are available on YouTube, and there were many excellent presentations — so many it would be impossible to watch them all. The range of topics covered everything from open source governance and community management, to inspiring uses of Linux and open source technologies, to technical talks and tutorials. Here are ten interesting technical talks focused on Linux and the kernel. (Disclaimer: I have not watched every single minute of all of these videos. I’ll leave it to you to decide how captivating they are.)  

1. Advanced Linux Server-Side Threats: How they work and what you can do about them

Olivier Bilodeau covers how malware and hacking have evolved on Linux servers from simple defacement, motivated by visibility, to organized crimeware, motivated by money and why you should care. He also covers the latest threats, how they work, and how to detect and respond to them. 

2. LXD 

Canonical’s Tycho Andersen covers LXD, a container-based “hypervisor” based on LXC, which was announced four months ago. He gives a technical overview and discusses the project’s status.

3. Why you should consider using btrfs … like Google does.

Marc Merlin compares btrfs to LVM and ZFS and explains its advantages.

4. Flying with Linux

Andrew Tridgell discusses the latest in his efforts to port ArduPilot to Linux and his efforts to create a real Linux-based autopilot. Tridgell, the Dronecode technical steering committee chair, will also keynote at The Linux Foundation’s Embedded Linux Conference, March 23-25 in San Jose, this year.

5. FireFoxOS and the Linux Kernel

Mobile developer Aimee Maree Forsstrom gives an overview of the FirefoxOS architecture and how it uses the Linux kernel.

6. IPMI – because ACPI and UEFI weren’t terrifying enough

Matthew Garrett, a security expert at Nebula, explains IPMI – the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (what he calls his latest four-letter word) – a protocol that allows admins to power machines on and off remotely.

7. etcd: distributed locking and service discovery

Brandon Philips, CoreOS CTO and co-founder, explains the basics of how etcd works for sysadmins who want to use it in distributed systems. Etcd is an open source component of the CoreOS Linux distribution that stores configuration information across clusters and is failure tolerant. CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi will speak at Collaboration Summit this month in Santa Rosa.

8. Getting More Out Of System Suspend In Linux

System suspend isn’t new but it has changed over the last year. Rafael Wysocki, a developer at the Intel Open Source Technology Center, covers where it fits into Linux kernel power management, what’s changed with “suspend to idle” and why, and other developments.

9. SD Cards and Filesystems for Embedded Systems

Peter Chubb presents his results from benchmarking the performance of several SD cards for storage in embedded development. 

10. SL[AUO]B: Kernel memory allocator design and philosophy

Chistopher Lameter explains Slab memory in the Linux kernel.