I’m back from USA after one week attending Linux Plumbers Conference. This was my first time in LPC, in which I was part of the CoreOS, talking about “From libabc to libkmod: writing core libraries”.

It was a very good experience and I’m glad to meet so many developers, both kernel and userspace hackers. Some of them I only knew from IRC, mailing-lists, etc and it was great time to share our experiences, discuss the current problems in Linux and even fix bugs :-). We seem finally to have reached a consensus on how module signing should be done - the outcome of Rusty Russel’s talk is that he will now start applying some pending patches. There will be no required changes to kmod, except a cosmetic one in modinfo to show if a module is signed or not.

Rusty was also very helpful in fixing a long-standing bug in Linux kernel: a call to init_module() returns that a module is already loaded, even if it didn’t finish it’s initialization yet. This used to be “fixed” in module-init-tools by a nasty hack adding a “sleep(10000)” if the module state (checked on sysfs) is “coming”. I mean “fixed” because this approach is still racy, even though the race window is much shorter than without it. So we finally sat down and wrote a draft patch to fix it. This will probably reach Linus tree in the next merge window.

The above example only seconds what Paul McKenney said on his blog yesterday: “A number of the people I informally polled called out the hallway track as the most valuable part of the conference, which I believe to be a very good thing indeed!” - I was one of the people he informally polled ;-). I’d like to thank all the Committee and people involved in organizing this conference - it was a very great experience.

Finally, you can find my slides below (or download from Google Docs). I think soon the audio will be published. Meanwhile you may enjoy Lennart’s picture when he was a child in slide #5 (during the talk he claimed it’s not him, but I don’t believe - they are too similar :-)).