Hírolvasó

Things remain calm, although I do suspect that part of it is that it's been the July 4th week in the US, and a lot of Europe is starting to go away on summer vacation.

But hey, let's not look a gift horse too closely in the mouth. Maybe it's really just that 6.10 is shaping up well. Right? RIGHT?

The Rust Microconference returns this year again. It covers both Rust in the kernel and Rust in general.

The submission deadline is July 14th. Submissions are made via the LPC submission system, selecting Rust MC for Track. Please see The Ideal Microconference Topic Session as well.

Possible Rust for Linux topics:

• Rust in the kernel (e.g. status update, next steps).
• Use cases for Rust around the kernel (e.g. subsystems, drivers, other modules…).
• Discussions on how to abstract existing subsystems safely, on API design, on coding guidelines.
• Integration with kernel systems and other infrastructure (e.g. build system, documentation, testing and CIs, maintenance, unstable
  features, architecture support, stable/LTS releases, Rust versioning, third-party crates).
• Updates on its subprojects (e.g. klint, pinned-init).
• Rust versioning requirements and using Linux distributions’ toolchains.

Possible Rust topics:

• Language and standard library (e.g. upcoming features, stabilization of the remaining features the kernel needs, memory model).
• Compilers and codegen (e.g. rustc improvements, LLVM and Rust, rustc_codegen_gcc, gccrs.
• Other tooling and new ideas (Coccinelle for Rust, bindgen, Compiler Explorer, Cargo, Clippy, Miri).
• Educational material.
• Any other Rust topic within the Linux ecosystem.

Hope to see you there!

Today we're showing you how to use iked to tunnel both IPv4 as well as IPv6 to a remote server for a self-managed VPN. We're doing all this with utilities from the OpenBSD base system so the setup is nice and sleek, completely avoiding the need to install countless programs from ports.

Not only that, but we'll also show you how to isolate the VPN traffic in it's own routing domain so it can be used only when required, (or if you're really clever like us, you can even configure more than one simultaneously).

Of course, the setup supports inbound connections too, so you can run servers from diverse physical locations whilst using the inbound address space and connectivity of the datacentre. Stuck without IPv6 or inbound connectivity at home? Not anymore! All this excitement and even more is right here waiting for you in setting up an IPv6 capable VPN. Read it today!

It comes with great sadness that on June 24th, 2024 we lost a great contributor to the Linux Plumbers Conference and the whole of Linux generally. Daniel Bristot de Oliveira passed away unexpectedly at the age of 37. Daniel has been an active participant of Linux Plumbers since 2017. Not only has he given numerous talks, which were extremely educational, he also took leadership roles in running Microconferences. He was this year’s main Microconference runner for both the Scheduler Microconference as well as the Real-Time Microconference. This year’s conference will be greatly affected by his absence. Many have stated how Daniel made them feel welcomed at Linux Plumbers. He always had a smile, would make jokes and help developers come to a conclusion for those controversial topics. He perfectly embodied the essence of what Linux Plumbers was all about. He will be missed.

ISO releases new C++ language standards on a three-year cadence; now that it's been more than a year since the finalization of C++23, we have a good idea of what features could be adopted for C++26 — although proposals can still be submitted until January 2025. Of particular interest is the addition of support for hazard pointers and user-space read-copy-update (RCU). Even though C++26 is not yet a standard, many of the proposed features are already available to experiment with in GCC or Clang.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of seven more stable kernels. Versions 6.9.8, 6.6.37, 6.1.97, 5.15.162, 5.10.221, 5.4.279, and 4.19.317 are now available.

The Linux kernel has grown in complexity over the years. Complete understanding of how it works via code inspection has become virtually impossible. Today, tracing is used to follow the kernel as it performs its complex tasks. Tracing is used today for much more than simply debugging. Its framework has become the way for other parts of the Linux kernel to enhance and even make possible new features. Live kernel patching is based on the infrastructure of function tracing, as well as BPF. It is now even possible to model the behavior and correctness of the system via runtime verification which attaches to trace points. There is still much more that is happening in this space, and this microconference will be the forum to explore current and new ideas.

This year, focus will also be on perf events:

Perf events are a mechanism for presenting performance counters and Linux software events to users. There are kernel and userland components to perf events. The kernel supplies the APIs and the perf tooling presents the data to users.

Possible ideas for topics for this year’s conference:

• Feedback about the tracing/perf subsystems overall (e.g. how can people help the maintainers).
• Reboot persistent in-memory tracing buffers, this would make ftrace a very powerful debugging and performance analysis tool for kexec and could also be used for post crash debugging.
• – Handling exposing enum names dynamically to user space to improve symbolic printing.
• Userspace instrumentation (libside), including discussion of its impacts on the User events ABI.
• Collect state dump events from kernel drivers (e.g. dump wifi interfaces configuration at a given point in time through trace buffers).
• Current work implementing performance monitoring in the kernel
• User land profiling and analysis tools using the perf event API
• Improving the kernel perf event and PMU APIs
• Interaction between perf events and subsystems like cgroups, kvm, drm, bpf, etc.
• Improving the perf tool and its interfaces in particular w.r.t. to scalability of the tool
• Implementation of new perf features and tools using eBPF, like the ones in tools/perf/util/bpf_skel/
• Further use of type information to augment the perf tools
• Novel uses of perf events for debugging and correctness
• New challenges in performance monitoring for the Linux kernel
• Regression testing/CI integration for the perf kernel infrastructure and tools
• Improving documentation
• Security aspects of using tracing/perf tools

The submission deadline has been updated to July 12th.

Come and join us in the discussion, we hope to see you there!

Please follow the suggestions from this BLOG post when submitting a CFP for this track.

Submissions are made via LPC submission system, selecting Track “Tracing / Perf events MC”