Linux Foundation publishes slides and video from 2012 Collaboration Summit

The Linux Foundation has released many slides and video recordings of the presentations given at the recent Collaboration Summit, which ran from 3 to 5 April in San Francisco. Topics covered include virtualisation and cloud computing, licensing, desktop software and the Tizen mobile operating system. A number of these presentations offer insights into current developments in the kernel environment.

In "The Linux Kernel: What's Next", a panel discussion led by Greg Kroah-Hartman, well-known Linux kernel developers discuss current kernel development aspects; for example, John W. Linville's contribution outlines how the kernel's Wi-Fi chip support has significantly improved over the past few years. The developer discusses this aspect in greater detail in a separate presentation (video, slides).

A presentation by Btrfs development lead Chris Mason, entitled "Btrfs Filesystem: Status and New Features", provides an overview of the latest Btrfs improvements. Among other things, the developer demonstrates new functions that were introduced with Linux 3.3 and, for instance, allow a RAID 1 to be converted into a RAID 0. Mason also explains some of the changes made for Linux 3.4, such as the support of larger metadata blocks, and describes a recently fixed problem that previously caused throughput reductions in certain configurations. The developer demonstrates the effects on the filesystem's access patterns in an animation; to provide a comparison, he also shows animations of the access patterns of Ext4 and XFS.

In "Using the LIO SCSI Target Stack" (video, slides), Roland Dreier offers some background information on the new Linux SCSI target stack, which was introduced with Linux 2.6.38 and has since been extended considerably. Arnaldo Carvalho's presentation entitled "The Linux Perf Tools: Overview and Current Developments" (video, slides) provides an overview of perf, a tool that is relevant for tracing and debugging. The videos and slides of many further presentations can be found via the Collaboration Summit 2012 programme overview.

(crve)