The 2004 Kernel Summit

The 2004 Kernel Summit was scheduled for July 19 and 20, immediately prior to the Ottawa Linux Symposium. For those who are interested, the advance agenda is available. LWN editor Jonathan Corbet was a member of the program committee and attended the event; the following is his report.

Monday

Monday got off to a bit of a slow start; it seems that some of the developers may have enjoyed themselves a bit too much at the opening dinner the night before. Summit attendees also had a serious problem: ISP troubles keep the wireless network down all day, so there was little alternative to actually listening to the ongoing sessions. That said, a constructive set of discussions was held with little overt disagreement among the participants.

Monday's sessions include:

• The processor panel. Engineers from Intel, AMD, and IBM discussed where their architectures are going and the implications for the Linux kernel.

• Virtual memory, with special attention to the topics of NUMA support, hotpluggable memory, and page clustering.

• Software suspend; what will it take before we can reliably suspend and restore our systems?

• Kobjects and sysfs, and what needs to be done to get the developers to complain about them less in 2.7.

• Video drivers, featuring a cameo appearance by Keith Packard.

• Desktop performance. Robert Love led a discussion on how the Linux kernel can better support desktop applications.

• Short topics, being an opportunity for developers to present an interesting issue in five minutes.

Tuesday

Tuesday's coverage is now complete. This long day was set aside for a wide range of topics, from customer experiences to clustering, to the development process. The individual sessions were:

• The customer panel was a discussion led by technical managers from Goldman Sachs and Amazon.com; they talked about the problems they have with Linux and how the kernel could better support their needs.

• Clustered storage and just what capabilities need to go into the kernel to support this feature.

• Kexec and fast booting; what is required to make the Linux kernel boot in a reasonable period of time?

• RAS tools, with an emphasis on simple tools to help track down kernel reliability problems.

• Networking summit summary. One week prior to the kernel summit, a small group got together in Oregon for a two-day networking summit. Stephen Hemminger summarized the results for the kernel group.

• Asynchronous I/O; a session on what is required to make AIO work properly under Linux, and whether it is worth doing.

• Multipath I/O and device mapper issues.

• Virtualization, running virtual machines under (and on top of) Linux.

• Security. Linux has acquired a great many security features over the last few years; what other work is required in that area?

• Class-based Kernel Resource Management.

• OSDL relations. How does the Open Source Development Labs relate with the development community, and how can that relationship be improved?

• The final session was about the development process; have a look to see what was said about when the 2.7 development series will begin - the answer is not quite what one would expect.

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