Just a few random things I wanted to get out about this year's Linux Symposium.

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My big "wall of kernel developers" turned out very well, with lots of different people taking pictures of it. I wanted to get everyone who had a patch to sign the thing, and I counted 105 signatures at the end of the week. So, since the attendance was somewhere around 700 people or so, 1/7 of the attendees had gotten a kernel patch into the Linux kernel within the past 2 months.

That is a pretty concentrated number of kernel developers for any type of conference.

I'll be dragging the poster around to different places through the year (OSCON is next), and eventually take it, or send it to linux.conf.au where it will be raffled off for charity.

If you are somewhere you think a lot of kernel developers are going to be, and want me to send you the poster so you can get their signatures, just let me know.

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My talk went really well, despite being misquoted about the fact the size of the Linux kernel is growing both with number of individual developers as well as the overall code size. My paper explaining all of this can be found here, and the slides I used for the talk can be found here for people who want to see the real numbers and information provided.

The scripts used to create this information can be found in the paper, and I'll be updating them later in the week, along with the scripts I used to create the big posters too.

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Papers you should read if you have not already:

• Len Brown, ACPI in Linux -- Myths vs. Reality
• Zachary A. Brown, Asynchronous system calls
• Venkatesh Pallipadi and Adam Belay, cpuidle - Do nothing, efficiently...
• Inaky Perez-Gonzalez, My bandwidth is wider than yours: Ultrawideband, Wireless USB and WiNET in Linux
• Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, The 7 dwarves: debugging information beyond gdb
• Steven Rostedt, Internals of the RT Patch

That last one about RT makes me not so afraid of the whole -rt kernel patchset and it even looks kind of fun to me now...

Heck, go read them all, they are all great papers and you will learn something by just browsing through them.

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Overall, the conference was great. I had a blast and James's final keynote was great, talking about evolutionary theory, obsolete computer architectures, and how to embrace the myrad of forks we all generate everyday within the Linux communities. What more could anyone want out of a week?

posted Wed, 11 Jul 2007 in [/diary]