Monday afternoon

04 Sep 2007 The afternoon started with 3 talks about filesystems. I sat in all 3 of them, because I had a nice seat and didn't want to give it up ;)

The VFS and cluster filesystems - Steven Whitehouse (Red Hat)
Hard disks are dead. Now what? - Jörn Engel (logfs.org)
Btrfs -- a new copy on write filesystem - Chris Mason (Oracle)

None of these talks were of particular interest to me, so I didn't pay much attention. Instead, I tried to work on HPPC a bit, but after failing to write even the most basic code, I gave up on that quickly.

How to not invent kernel interfaces - Arnd Bergmann
This talk was more like what I wanted. Some insight into how the kernel works, specifically which interfaces exist between kernel-space and user-space and which one should be used. Surprisingly, the speaker advises to avoid using any of the current interfaces unless it's absolutely necessary. Instead of there being a single good solution, there are just varying degrees of disadvantages.

The talk itself was very lively and interesting, but I wished some of the developers should just keep their comments to theirself (or the mailinglist) instead of crying them out in the middle of a talk.

How to work with the kernel development process - Jonathan Corbet (LWN.net)
Jonathan Corbet is turning out to be one of my favorite speakers at this conference. This is again a talk by him, about how the kernel development process works and how one should interact with it. The main lessons to learn is "release early" and "let everyone know what you're doing". I need to work on both of those, because I tend to keep my code locked up for a long time before releasing it (if I even release it).

I will mail the netfilter maintainers about HPPC soon, and let them know what I plan to do with HPPC.

By the way, I advise everyone who is serious about wanting to enter the kernel development arena to read the paper on which this talk is based.


Duxford
Duxford is the Imperial War Museum and we were invited for a guided tour there. There were 3 tours: the American hangar which contains lots of planes from the American military (including the Blackbird), the airspace hangar which has contemporary airplanes (also the Concorde) and the land warfare hall, where tanks and the like are located.

I followed the land warfare hall with the idea that, because my colleague wanted to follow the american hangar tour, he would take plenty of pictures that I could use aswell. But we not only managed to get a full tour of the land warefare hall in time, there was also time left to quickly run through the american hangar.

So I have pictures of both.

I won't discuss these pictures, because there are too much of them. Just look at the pictures and the movies :)

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