I’ve been to the LinuxCon 2012 in Japan from 6th to 8th of June in Yokohama. Fortunately, my lab (Takada lab) pays one trip to one conference in Japan so the trip was affordable for me as a poor exchange student. I decided to go by Shinkansen, the high speed train that moves my physical body from Nagoya to Yokohama in 80 minutes instead of four hours by local train. Fun fact: GPS confirmed we were making about 260 km/h.
Day 1
After arriving in Yokohama and being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people in the trains and the utter confusion of the Tokyo-area subway system I found the venue of the LinuxCon at the Pacifico Yokohama easy enough. The place easily fit all attendees and after the queue in the registration it was never necessary to enqueue for anything. That’s a welcome change from the Chaos Communication Congress, where you don’t get by without queues, squeezing and sitting in two sessions to keep the place for the third session. Also contrary to that, free WiFi was available, was fast enough and stable. Yay for that. Generally yay for the organization, except for the keynotes on the first day everything was on time and the deviation from the published schedule was minimal.
I started reviewing everything in detail not but after realizing that it would be way too much noise, I decided to shorten it to the relevant bits without too much blurb.
The keynotes were non-remarkable except for the the technical talk by Greg KH who gave examples of things not to do when sending patches to the Linux kernel, interestingly using the over 400 patches received in the last 2 weeks. Pretty impressive.
From the following talks, I really liked the talk from Chris Mason who does an awesome job with btrfs and had much patience to answer lots of my questions afterwards. There was generally quite a lot of talks about ARM and also on the development of Linux and how Japanese developers can take take part.
Day 2
The second day had maybe the best ARM talks of the conference. One was the state of Ubuntu ARM and Canonicals plans for ARM servers. They also talked about Ubuntu on Android, but I don’t really believe it is going to take off. The second talk was on the ARM Sub-Architecture Status. I am quite excited about the changes in the ARM tree, especially how they try to unify all the code with a common base and Device Tree (of which I didn’t hear before but which is quite exciting). I’d love to write an entry for a board and then just boot it, without compiling a new kernel, without writing a new port for the board.
Day 3
The third day had a talk on Fedora ARM (haha, see the pattern? Ubuntu and now Fedora) and how they will proceed. Seemed to me like a more down to earth approach. They also had a nice talk about single zImages to boot Linux. Currently distributions have dozens of zImages for ARM because there is no real platform standard and the kernels are exclusive to boards (or board families at most). A rather entertaining talk was made by Satoru Ueda about how Sony uses Linux in Consumer Electronics Products. I liked his style quite a bit.
Actually, I need to say more. Except for the keynotes which had interpreters, the talks were in english and while most were fine, I can see especially Japanese people have problems understanding fast and colloquial american english. Satoru Ueda was unique in this regard because he had japanese translations of some of the more “tricky” terms on his slides. Oh well, his english terms were tricky and uncommon english words as well, but anyway, I think in general the talk was quite good.
From the keynotes, I also really liked James Bottomley’s keynote about Social vs Technical Engineering in the Kernel, it was a delightful session presented with in cambridge english with the perfect combination of facts and wit. Oh they had free food and beer at the closing reception, yay!
Overall
Generally I think the point of the LinuxCon was not really the talks. Some were good, some were bad, but they mostly serve as a entry point for conversations. I met some really cool people that I only knew from “teh internets” before, if at all and had some interesting discussions and learned a lot. Also, going to conferences like these is a great way to find jobs. Many people had connections and of ways to get around HR departments in their companies to hire skilled people right away (which kinda shows what a bad jobs HR departments make). Also interesting how work-from-home has become a quite viable way of work on Linux.
Generally: it is always a pleasure to talk to people with similar interests and similar mindset, so I look forward to my next FOSS conference soonish.