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18 September 2012, 12:09

LPC videos on Linux & UEFI, ARM and ACPI 5.0

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Zoom Matthew Garrett presents background information on UEFI support under Linux
The organisers of the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) 2012, which was held at the end of August in San Diego, have released videos, notes and presentation slides from the conference presentations. The talks are primarily concerned with Linux software that deals with the interaction between hardware and the user interface.

Red Hat's Matthew Garrett, for example, gave a talk entitled "Plumbing UEFI into Linux" on the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) which is currently supplanting the traditional BIOS on laptop motherboards. Intel's Harry Hsiung goes into even more detail in his two part "UEFI tutorial" (1, 2). Both presentations also discuss details of Linux support for UEFI Secure Boot, currently under development.

Videos of the presentations "Byte Queue Limits" and "CoDel and FQ CoDel, fighting the delays" deal with changes merged into Linux 3.3 and Linux 3.5, respectively, aimed at preventing bufferbloat, a term used for problems such as high network latencies and disrupted connections caused by too much buffering during data transfers. Kernel developer Arnd Bergmann's "Status of ARM" presentation provides an overview of the latest developments in the code for ARM systems in the Linux kernel and details of the ongoing work to tidy up this code. In his presentation, "ACPI 5.0 in Linux", Len Brown, who maintains the kernel's ACPI code, details the status of ACPI 5.0 support in the operating system. Mark Charlebois and Behan Webster's presentation – "LLVMLinux: Compiling the Linux Kernel with LLVM" – describes their efforts to compile the Linux kernel using the LLVM-based Clang.

However, not all presentations were recorded, but some of the presentation slides also offer interesting background information. Alex Williamson, the main developer behind userspace driver framework VFIO (Virtual Function I/O), merged into Linux 3.6, discusses the framework in a talk entitled "VFIO: are we there yet?"PDF. VFIO (Virtual Function I/O) is designed primarily for KVM, to allow PCI and PCIe devices to be passed through to guest systems, enabling them to address these devices with low latencies, high data throughputs and without risk to the host. Linux memory management expert Andrea Arcangeli talkedPDF about AutoNUMA, his recently developed system aimed at improving on the way Linux currently attempts to assign processes on multi-processor systems. His approach aims to assign processes to a single CPU to speed up their memory access.

(crve)

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