Hey, this is my feedback of ELC 2012. If you didn’t read the first part, about ABS 2012, you can read the previous post first.
ELC is one of my favorite conferences as I can meet several talented people and have good talks about Linux in embedded devices. This time was not an exception and I enjoyed very much. The main reason I was there was because I was going to present kmod, the new tool to manage kernel modules. But that would be only on the last day of the conference. Let’s start from the beginning.
To open the conference Jon Corbet gave his usual kernel report starting from January 2011 and going on through the events in each month: the mess in ARM, death of the big kernel lock, userspace code in kernel tree (should we put libreoffice there, too?) and so on. Following this keynote I went to see Saving the Power Consumption of the Unused Memory. Loïc Pallard from ST-Ericsson talked about how memory consumption in increasingly important in embedded devices for the total power consumption. We are going from the usual 512 MB on smartphones to 2 \~ 4 GB of DDR RAM. There are some techniques to reduce this the power drained and he presented the PASR framework, that allows the kernel to turn on/off specific banks/dies of memory since not all of them is used all the time. Later on talking to the guys from Chromium OS I realized that this is especially true when the device is sleeping. We may want to discard caches (therefore use much less memory when in sleep mode) and then turn off banks not used. In my opinion the battery consumption is one of the most important today for embedded Linux devices: I’m tired to have to charge my smartphone every day or every X hours. I hope we can improve the current state by using techniques as the one presented in this talk.
In Embedded Linux Pitfalls Sean Hudson from Mentor Graphics shared his experience while coming from closed embedded solutions to open source ones. Nice talk! I think people doing closed development should see presentations like this: one of the main reasons for failing in opensource is not being able to talk to each other: HW guys not talking to SW guys, NIH, not playing the rules of the communities and therefore having to carry a lot of patches, etc. I’ve always been involved with opensource so I don’t know very well how things work for companies doing closed development, but I do know that more often than not we see those companies trying to participate in communities/opensource and failing miserably. In my opinion one of the main reason is because they fail to talk, discuss and agree on the right solution with communities.
One of the best talks in ELC 2012 was Making RCU Safe for Battery-Powered Devices. Paul McKenney is one of the well known hackers of the Linux kernel, maintaining the RCU subsystem. Prior to this talk I had no idea RCU had anything to do with power consumption. He went through a series of slides showing how and why RCU got rewritten several times in the past years, how he solved the problems reported by community and how things get much more complicated with preemption and RT. He finished his presentation saying that the last decade was the most important of his carrier and that is because of the feedback he got from RCU being used in real life. I’d really love to see more people from Academia realizing this.
The next day Mike Anderson gave a great keynote about The Internet of things. Devices in Internet are surpassing the number of people connected and soon they will be much more important. It’s a great opportunity for embedded companies and for Linux to become the most important Operating System in the world. Recent news about this are already telling us that 51% of the Internet traffic is non-human (although we can’t classify all of that as “good traffic”). Following his keynote I went to see Thomas Petazzoni from Free Electrons talk about Buildroot. I like Buildroot’s simplicity and from what Thomas said this is one thing they care about: Buildroot is a rootfs generator and not a meta-distro like openembedded. There were at least 3 people asking if Buildroot could support binary packages and he emphasized that it was a design decision not to support them. I like this: use the right tool for the each job. I already used Buildroot before to create a rootfs using uClibc and it was great to see that it was already packaging the last version of kmod before I went to ELC.
In the end of the second day I participated in Real-Time (BoFs) with Frank Rowand. It was great to have Steven Rostedt and Paul McKenney there as they contributed a lot to the discussion, pointing out the difficulties in RT, the current status of RT_PREEMPT patches regarding mainline and forecasts of when it will be completely merged. There were some discussions about “can we really trust in RT Linux? How does it compare with having an external processor doing the RT tasks?”. In the end people seemed to agree that it all boils down about what do you have in your kernel (you probably don’t want to enable crappy drivers), how do you tolerate fails (hard-RT vs soft-RT) and that RT is not a magic flag that you turn on and it’s done: it demands profiling, kernel and application tuning and expertise in the field. People gave several examples of devices using the RT_PREEMPT patches: from robots and aircrafts in the space to cameras (the Sony cameras given away on the last day were 1 of the examples).
On Friday, the last day of the conference, I was much more worried about my presentation in the end of the day than with other talks. Nonetheless I couldn’t miss Koen Kooi from Texas Instruments talking about Beaglebone. It’s a very interesting device for those who like to DIY: it’s much smaller than its brothers like Beagleboard and Pandaboard and still has enough processing power for lots of applications. Koen was displaying his slides using node.js running on a Beaglebone. What I do like to see though is barebox replacing u-boot as the bootloader. If you attended Koen’s talk on ELCE last year, you know u-boot is one of the culprits for a longer boot. Jason from TI kindly gave me a Beaglebone so I can use it for testing kmod; when I have some spare time I’ll take a look on the things missing for using barebox on it, too.
The last talk of the conference was mine: Managing Kernel Modules With kmod. I received a good feedback from people there: they liked the idea behind kmod - designing a library and then the tools on top of that. I had some issues with my laptop in the middle of my presentation, but it all went well. I could show how kmod works, the details behind the scenes, the short history of the projects and how it’s replacing a well known piece of userspace tools of Linux in all major desktop and embedded distros. When I was showing the timeline of the project I remember Mike Anderson saying: “tell us when it will be done”. I can’t really say it’s done now, but after the conference we already had versions 6 and 7 and contrary to other releases in the latest versions the number of commits is very small. After 3\~4 months the project is reaching a maintenance phase as I said it would. If you would like to see my slides, download it here or see it online below. You can also watch the video of my talk as well as all the others in LF’s video website.