Zbr's days.
September
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
           
5
           
2007
Months
Sep

About :: TODO :: Blog :: RSS :: Old blog :: Projects :: GIT :: Gallery :: Notes

Wed, 05 Sep 2007

Added KS photos.

Two albums - flight to the London and views from the plain, and Linux kernel summit attendees - set of photos from the meeting.
All are awailable in gallery.

/devel/other :: Link / Comments (0)


Everyone likes to create a new userspace API and generally

no one can make this really good (at least for the first turn). Michel showed us how bad some errors in this area are and rised a discussion about how the situation could be if not fixed, but at least changed - he proposed to completely formalize userspace API development. Discussion though turned into proposing different ways of (automatic) testing.

/devel/other :: Link / Comments (0)


Bugs.

Andrew described how kernel bugzilla is being used and what can be improved in the way bug walks from original reporter to developer and eventual fix and what problems rise on this way like bugs which gets 'lost', i.e. when reporter does not return back or can not proceed with testing, timing issues in fixing bugs - if bug has not been fixed very quickly probability of the successful resolve drops dramatically. Discussion was rised about ways bugs are being fixed right now with pointed problematic places and how a situatin with unloved bugs and bad developers should be fixed. Discussion then proceeded about review process and how it can be improved further. One of the idea proposed by Andrew is to introduce new 'Reviewed-by' tag for patches, which will include a link for review so that people could determine quality of the patch and thus introduce some kind of virtual currency and make review process more attractive, which was objected by Linus at least for small patches.

/devel/other :: Link / Comments (0)


Kernel summit stated with brief introduction by Theodor Tso.

Then boring stuff took its place: Greg Kroah-Hartman started a discussion about IP, distros all related things. People talked about shorter/longer releases, about how will or will not entterprise customers and community happy with that, about tracking regressions... A long and quite emotional discussion about API breaking took place then. After passions were cooled down a bit, people talked about new hardware, about getting drivers upstream and related to this process problems. Switched to merge early motto and decided that even bad driver in the tree is better than no driver at all (questionable from my point of view).

/devel/other :: Link / Comments (1)


Next part is mini-conferences reports.

First one is power management report. Found that suspend to ram kind of works for majrity of people, but there are quite a lot of problems mostly in drivers. Suspend to disk is a thing that everyone hates, and second version (TuxOnIce) is out of the tree. Drivers are blamed for all problems, like some network cards (mostly wireless) can not be turned off or switched into power-saving mode (like OLPC wireless card). Next filesystem/storage report. It was held to connect different filesystem/storage developers together to understand how to have a progress in crossing areas (like unionfs, which touchs underlying filesystem in different ways) Number of new storage features (like self-correcting code usage (if I understood that correctly)) and object-based disks were briefly described. VM talk touched memory fragmentation, allocation, caches and theirs features (like shrinking). FS part contained generic delayed allocation and its problems and short description of various features. Containers and related problems were shortly introduced. Virtualization minisummit report included brief status of the different virtualization technologies existing today. number of issues were described: performance problem in the virtualized environment and ways to deal with them, interfaces and access methods, different virtualization mechanisms and theirs status and long way of merging virtualization support into different distros. This presentation was actually too technical, but still very interesting (even modulo my understanding).

/devel/other :: Link / Comments (0)