LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ContainerCon NA 2015: Full Schedule

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10:25am PDT

Everything's a File Descriptor - Josh Triplett

The classic UNIX philosophy, "everything's a file", allows tools and system calls that operate on files to work on devices, /proc, and other objects. This doesn't mean everything has a filename; /dev, /proc, and /sys expose devices and kernel structures with filenames, but many new system calls offer file descriptors that serve as userspace handles for kernel structures without any corresponding filename, including signalfd, timerfd, and eventfd. The resulting file descriptors can be used with event loops using poll, epoll, or select.

Thiago Macieira and I implemented "clonefd", which turns processes into file descriptors and turns waitpid() into poll or read. These descriptors serve as race-free, container-safe process identifiers.

This talk will present clonefd, fd-based API design, and discuss other kernel APIs that would benefit from file descriptors.

Speakers

Josh Triplett

Principal Engineer, Intel

Josh Triplett hacks on system software, including Rust, the Linux kernel, BITS, X, Git, Sparse, Debian, Chrome OS, and firmware. Josh enjoys using software for unconventional purposes, such as running Python in GRUB2 to test BIOS (https://biosbits.org). Josh has previously presented... Read More →

Everything's a File Descriptor pdf

Wednesday August 19, 2015 10:25am - 11:15am PDT
Willow B

Developer Experience Level - Any Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

10:25am PDT

Performance Monitoring in the Linux Kernel - Davidlohr Bueso, SUSE

Systems performance is a primary concern for most people involved in technology. This is particularly true and critical for companies investing significant resources in hardware, expecting Linux to scale well on larger machines, naturally beginning with the kernel. While there are several efforts to automate and integrate benchmarking across a wide range of systems, they are not very well known outside the community. In this talk, Davidlohr will present different alternatives to kernel performance monitoring through automation and will discuss how it can serve to actively detect regressions and new issues throughout the kernel, including how developers can easily test their changes on a wide range of workloads and gather important runtime metrics. In addition, different benchmarks for stressing different subsystems will be compared both at a micro level and for real world workloads.

Speakers

Davidlohr Bueso

Software Engineer, SUSE Labs

Davidlohr Bueso is a Linux kernel developer at SUSE Labs, focusing on performance and scalability. He works on various core kernel subsystems and has authored hundreds of fixes and enhancements towards making Linux better and faster. Prior to SUSE, Davidlohr worked at HP, tackling... Read More →

Wednesday August 19, 2015 10:25am - 11:15am PDT
Grand Ballroom C

Developer Experience Level - Intermediate Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

10:25am PDT

Tying TPMs Throughout The Stack - Matthew Garrett, CoreOS

We've never made much use of TPMs in Linux. Poorly understood and poorly trusted, they sit there on the LPC bus, gathering dust. But what if we can use them to provide meaningful additional security to systems? What if we could use the TPM to protect us from rootkits, bootkits and modified firmware? What if the TPM could secure your SSH keys against theft, make your random numbers more random and inform you that someone backdoored your laptop when you left it in your hotel room?

All of this is possible today, but it's not integrated and it's beyond the ability of even most skilled users. What can we do to tie this exceptionally useful security device into the underlying OS and make real steps to better security?

Speakers

Matthew Garrett

CoreOS

Matthew Garrett is a security developer at CoreOS, developing technologies to improve the security of containers and the systems that run them. He has a background in firmware integration, power management and fruitfly genetics and so has atypical ideas about system complexity and... Read More →

Wednesday August 19, 2015 10:25am - 11:15am PDT
Diamond

Developer Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

11:25am PDT

Pushing the Limits of Kernel Networking - Alexander Duyck, Red Hat

As network speeds continue to increase from 10Gb/s, to 40Gb/s, and very soon to 100Gb/s the rate at which packets can be transported increases putting pressure on the kernel to drive ever faster packet rates. This talk will cover what we currently know about the limits of the Linux kernel in terms of small packet networking performance, ongoing efforts to push those limits further, and a number of tips and tricks to get the most out of the kernel networking stack.

Speakers

Alexander Duyck

Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Alexander is a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat where he works on supporting and enabling new features and improving performance within the Linux kernel network stack. Prior to joining Red Hat he worked at Intel as a Network Software Engineer developing and maintaining the wired... Read More →

Wednesday August 19, 2015 11:25am - 12:15pm PDT
Grand Ballroom C

Developer Experience Level - Intermediate Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

11:25am PDT

The RT patch - What Needs to Be Done to Get it Into Mainline - Steven Rostedt, Red Hat

The Real Time patch (RT patch or PREEMPT_RT), has been maintained out of the Linux kernel tree since late 2004. It is the longest and largest patch set to be kept out of the tree and still widely used. A lot of the patch has made it into mainline (mutex code, priority inheritance futexes, ftrace, lockdep, hrtimers, generic interrupts, threaded irqs, Real Time scheduler, etc). The RT patch had so much influence on mainline, that new code for Real Time can now be directly added to mainline (for example: NO_HZ_FULL and the DEADLINE scheduler), but there is still a lot more that needs to go into mainline to make it a true RTOS. This talk will explain what those features are and what is holding it up from getting in. Some of it is technical and some of it is political. Both of these types of issues will be discussed.

Speakers

Steven Rostedt

Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat Inc

Steven Rostedt works for Red Hat and is the main developer for their Real Time kernel. Steven is the maintainer of the Real-Time stable releases. He works upstream mainly developing and maintaining ftrace (the official tracer of the Linux kernel). He also maintains trace-cmd and kernelshark... Read More →

Wednesday August 19, 2015 11:25am - 12:15pm PDT
Willow B

Developer Experience Level - Intermediate Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

11:25am PDT

Turtles All The Way: Running Linux on Open Hardware - Rob Landley

Patent expiration makes old technologies, such as the SuperH processor, interesting again. The last patent on sh2 (used in the Sega Saturn) expired in october 2014, and the last sh4 (dreamcast) patent expires in 2016. This lets us leverage existing kernel, toolchain, and userspace support on now royalty-free hardware.

We've implemented a cleanroom sh2-compatible processor design called "j2" with basic peripherals (serial, ethernet, mmc) in an FPGA, booted current Linux on it using existing open source toolchains, and released the VHDL under a BSD license. (For our next trick we're adding SMP support and a dozen DSPs, and manufacturing some ASIC versions.)

Our current website (and this demo) walks you through building/installing it on an s6 microboard (about $90 retail), but we're kickstarting a cheaper and more powerful FPGA in a raspberry PI 2 form factor.

Speakers

Rob Landley

Hobbyist & Geek, Hobbyist

I've been doing Linux for 20 years now. I maintain toybox and mkroot. I used to maintain busybox and the linux kernel Documentation directory and website. I wrote the initramfs documentation. I started the first GPL enforcement lawsuits, and created the 0BSD license to make up for... Read More →

Wednesday August 19, 2015 11:25am - 12:15pm PDT
Diamond

Developer Experience Level - Intermediate Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

2:00pm PDT

Optimizing Application Performance in Large Multi-core Systems - Waiman Long, HP

As more and more cores are cramming into a single CPU chip, even a commodity dual-socket server can now has dozens of cores/threads available for running applications. To efficiently utilize all the available cores, care must be taken to avoid excessive core-to-core synchronization and cacheline contention from becoming a performance bottleneck. Excessive cacheline contention also has an impact on system power consumption.

This presentation discusses various performance related kernel patches that have gone into the upstream kernel, are pending or being proposed that can help improving performance and scalability in large multi-core systems. It also discuss best practices to avoid this type of performance problems in user applications as well as tools available to diagnose them.

Speakers

Waiman Long

Hewlett Packard

Waiman Long is an experienced software engineer working in the Linux Performance and Scalability team of HP Enterprise Server Group. He is responsible for investigating and resolving performance and scalability issues of the Linux kernel on large multi-node NUMA systems. He is also... Read More →

Wednesday August 19, 2015 2:00pm - 2:50pm PDT
Grand Ballroom C

Developer Experience Level - Advanced Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

2:00pm PDT

Solving Device Tree Issues - Frank Rowand, Sony Mobile

Use of device tree is mandatory for all new ARM systems. But the implementation of device tree has lagged behind the mandate. The first priority has been correct function. Lower priorities include device tree validation and facilities to debug device tree problems and errors. This talk will focus on the status of debug facilities, how to debug device tree issues, and debug tips and tricks. Suggestions will be provided to driver writers for how to implement drivers to ease troubleshooting.

Speakers

Frank Rowand

Sony

Frank has meddled in the internals of several proprietary operating systems, but has been loyal to the Linux kernel since 1999. He has worked in many areas of technology, including performance, networking, platform support, drivers, real-time, and embedded. He is currently employed... Read More →

Wednesday August 19, 2015 2:00pm - 2:50pm PDT
Willow B

Developer Experience Level - Any Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

2:00pm PDT

ACPI 6 and Linux - Rafael J. Wysocki, Intel

ACPI 6, released in April 2015, is the first major revision of the ACPI specification developed under the UEFI Forum umbrella and including contributions from Linux community members. It introduces support for persistent memory, support for hierarchical lower-power idle states of CPUs, CPU clusters and the whole system, an extension allowing C-style expressions to be used in the ACPI Source Language and more. Overall, changes made by it are likely to affect Linux in significant ways.

I will describe the new specification process used to produce ACPI 6 and how the Linux community was involved in it. I will outline the implementation of the ACPI support in the Linux kernel and explain how the new specification revision is going to be addressed by it. I will also discuss a few most important changes with respect to the previous revisions of ACPI and their possible impact on Linux.

Speakers

Rafael J. Wysocki

Software Engineer, Intel OTC

Rafael maintains the Linux kernel's core ACPI and power management code, including the core infrastructure for IO device PM, CPU PM and system suspend/hibernation. He works at Intel Open Source Technology Center as a Software Engineer focusing on the mainline Linux kernel. Rafael... Read More →

Wednesday August 19, 2015 2:00pm - 2:50pm PDT
Diamond

Developer Experience Level - Intermediate Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

3:00pm PDT

Open-Channel Solid State Drives - Matias Bjørling

This presentation gives an introduction to Open-Channels SSDs and LightNVM - the kernel subsystem creating support for Open-Channel SSDs. Open-Channel SSDs allow applications to directly control internals of an SSD, thereby controlling data placement and garbage collection within the SSD. The benefits are consistent latency and throughput in high-performance workloads and extending its lifetime. The main objective of this talk is show the possibilities of this new storage interface, report on the current status of LightNVM, and present the development roadmap for both upcoming kernel functionality and user space support.

Speakers

Matias Bjørling

Member of Technical Staff, CNEX Labs

Matias Bjørling obtained a Ph.D. in operating systems and Solid State Drives from IT University of Copenhagen. He is currently a member of CNEX Labs technical staff. Before that, he worked with performance characterization of flash-based SSDs, operating- and database systems research... Read More →

Wednesday August 19, 2015 3:00pm - 3:50pm PDT
Diamond

Developer Experience Level - Any Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

3:00pm PDT

Topics of Interest from the MM summit - Sasha Levin

The MM summit, held as part of the larger LSF/MM summit gathers the leading memory management developers to get down to the bits and bytes of burning issues and solve them by having a discussion in a forum of other memory management hackers. As Jon Corbet puts it: "The LSF/MM Summit is arguably the most severely technical event on many kernel developers' schedules."

This presentation will cover the highlights of the discussions in the summit, and will summarize their aftermath both on the mailing list and upstream. It will also provide insight into various topics by expanding on various "extended hallway track" sessions that happened during the summit.

Speakers

Sasha Levin

Kernel Engineer, NVIDIA

Sasha helps maintain the Linux Kernel Stable and LTS trees. He is currently employed by Google where he helps make Linux better. Previously, Sasha was employed by Microsoft and the Ksplice team in Oracle.

Wednesday August 19, 2015 3:00pm - 3:50pm PDT
Grand Ballroom C

Developer Experience Level - Intermediate Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

3:00pm PDT

Using seccomp to Limit the Kernel Attack Surface - Michael Kerrisk

The seccomp (secure computing) facility is a means to limit the set of system calls a program may make. Starting from humble beginnings in Linux 2.6.12, seccomp has evolved to the point where it can be used to select exactly which system calls are permitted and to restrict the arguments that may be passed to those system calls. System call filtering is achieved by writing BPF programs--programs written for a small in-kernel virtual machine that is able to examine system call numbers and arguments. Seccomp applications include sandboxing and failure-mode testing, and seccomp is by now used in a number of web browsers, container systems such as Docker, and elsewhere. In this session, we'll look briefly at the history of seccomp before going on to examine the BPF virtual machine and some practical examples of filtering programs that restrict the set of permitted system calls.

Speakers

Michael Kerrisk

Trainer/consultant, man7.org Training and Consulting

Michael Kerrisk is the author of the acclaimed book, "The Linux Programming Interface" (http://man7.org/tlpi/), a guide and reference for system programming on Linux and UNIX. He contributes to the Linux kernel primarily via documentation, review, and testing of new kernel-user-space... Read More →

limiting kernel attack surface with seccomp LPC 2015 Kerrisk pdf

Wednesday August 19, 2015 3:00pm - 3:50pm PDT
Willow B

Developer Experience Level - Intermediate Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

4:00pm PDT

Botching up IOCTLs - Daniel Vetter

One clear insight kernel graphics hackers gained in the past few years is that trying to come up with a unified interface to manage the execution units and memory on completely different GPUs is a futile effort. So nowadays every driver has its own set of ioctls to allocate memory and submit work to the GPU. Which is nice, since there's no more insanity in the form of fake-generic, but actually only used-once interfaces. But the clear downside is that there's much more potential to screw things up.

To avoid repeating all the same mistakes again this talk will present some of the lessons learned while botching the job for the drm subsystem in general and the i915 driver specifically. The presentation will cover the very basics to avoid busywork and other embarrassment later on, reasonable testing and a thicket of stories of what all went wrong thus far in the drm subsystem.

Speakers

Daniel Vetter

Cloud Engineer, Intel

Currently I work at Intel’s Linux Cloud SE group, mostly creating havoc in kernel driver’s given my more than a decade of work in the graphics subsystem. I’m also co-maintaining the graphics subsystem. I also have been drm/i915 kernel maintainer for a few years, but handed that... Read More →

Wednesday August 19, 2015 4:00pm - 4:50pm PDT
Grand Ballroom C

Developer Experience Level - Any Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

4:00pm PDT

Suspend/Resume at the Speed of Light - Len Brown, Intel

System suspend/resume is the core energy saving strategy for numerous Linux-based systems, including Android, Chrome OS, Ubuntu and Fedora. The faster Linux can suspend/resume, the more often it can be used, and the more energy these systems can save.

We start by presenting analyze_suspend, a tool we developed to measure performance.
Analyze_suspend is freely available in open source, and we are hopeful that the community will embrace it to optimize Linux on a broad range of systems.

Then we explore the kernel and driver optimizations that have been made as a result of using this tool -- some are upstream, and some are still in development.

Finally, we look to the challenges ahead in reaching and sustaining Linux suspend/resume at the speed of light.

Speakers

Len Brown

Principal Engineer, Intel Open Source Technology Center

Len Brown has maintained and contributed to various parts of the Linux kernel power management sub-system for over 10 years. He is a Principal Engineer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center.

Wednesday August 19, 2015 4:00pm - 4:50pm PDT
Diamond

Developer Experience Level - Any Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon

4:00pm PDT

kernelci.org: The Upstream Kernel Validation Project - Tyler Baker, Linaro

Distributed boards farms across the world are working together to deliver unified build, boot, and test results for every merge of an upstream Linux kernel tree. A community based architecture agnostic effort, kernelci.org aims to detect regressions in a timely manner and report back to kernel developers with a concise summary of the issue(s). On every merge, all defconfigs for x86, arm, and arm64 are built, booted, and tested on over 300 real or virtual hardware platforms. The presentation will cover an introduction to the system, live demos, and how to start consuming the results. Come join in the discussion and help make Linux better!

Speakers

Tyler Baker

Principal Software Engineer, Foundries.io

Embedded Linux software engineer, working upstream on Linux kernel and Zephyr RTOS. Focusing on secure end to end connected devices, and over the air updates. Passionate blockchain and distributed ledger enthusiast. Cryptocurrency miner since 2011.

kci linuxcon pdf

Wednesday August 19, 2015 4:00pm - 4:50pm PDT
Willow B

Developer Experience Level - Beginner Linux Plumbers Conference LinuxCon