Open Source Summit Europe 2022

The Linux kernel is at the core of any Linux system; the performance and capabilities of the kernel will, in the end, place an upper bound on what the system as a whole can do. This talk will review recent events in the kernel development community, discuss the current state of the kernel and the challenges it faces, and look forward to how the kernel may address those challenges. Attendees of any technical ability should gain a better understanding of how the kernel got to its current state and what can be expected in the near future.

Bad bug reports are the first to be ignored by stressed kernel developers. This talk will teach you how to dramatically reduce this risk, as it will outline how to prepare and submit a decent bug report to the Linux developers; this will include describing a few common errors a lot of people make when reporting issues with the kernel. You'll also learn which Linux bugs are unlikely to be addressed, as reporting such issues might be a waste of your time. You’ll learn about the other side of the spectrum, too: which kind of bugs kernel developers have to fix quickly, as they otherwise risk getting into trouble with Linus Torvalds himself.

I2C and its subset SMBus are proven technology which have been around since the 1980s and usually simply work. Their functionality has been exposed to Linux userspace as early as 1995 and not much was happening regarding new features. With the release of the SMBus 3.x specification, one minor update was the increase of the maximum block length from 32 to 255 byte. Now, this maximum is exposed to Linux users as part of "good, old" IOCTLs. Updating it needs careful planning to not break userspace applications. Learn here about the process, obstacles, and choices taken in order to provide an improvement to users caused by a minor update of the specification.