plumbers conference

LPC was amazing, I might say it was the best conference I've attended so far. Im not a kernel hacker as someone may thought but even a userspace developer can say that we need more conferences like that. Let me summarize some talks/bofs I've been present at:

Audio

Lennart handled the audio miniconf which turns out to show how some alsa limitations, especially in its API documentation. The conclusion was that there are far too many project trying to solve but none offer a good pcm API which application could rely on. The audio bof was basically Lennart making sure Takashi know his alsa issues list. In addition to Lennart's list we also told Takashi we would like to have support for 'virtual' devices such as bluetooth headsets.

Video

Video miniconf was very interesting too, most about v4l2. In the driver area it seems that some common code is being duplicated so there is a plan to create an API to be used as core of new drivers. But for me the most interesting was the idea of user space daemon very similar to Pulse but for video which should solve most of the problem when trying to use a webcam on user space.

Boot

WOW I must say this miniconf was the big show of the conference, at least for me, the very first thing was a netbook booting on 5 sec. If there is something that can grab the attention more than a fancy ui demonstration that is a very amazing boot time. Im pretty sure that this presentation might change what most distros are doing nowadays, especially when the super read ahead (sReadAhead for short) code was released.

Power Management

Another pretty good minconf, olpc guys showing how they handled power managment on their device. Basically XO doesn't have an acpi so all is handled directly, sometimes they even turn off some chips to gain more hours of usage. In another presentation it was discussed that the more drivers support power management the more we salve power, although this may sound very obvious the real idea is to make more drivers power aware instead of just quality of a few.

DBus

Ok, that is my area, and as all the other it went pretty well. It started with discussion how to improve desktop experiency. Basically how DBus is changing the daemons around the linux desktop offering a better support/service to applications. Then the presentation about upstart 1.0, it was pretty cool to see the API for jobs on upstart, this might be usefull for most application/daemons that do want to spawn processes. After a small interruption the presentation continue with Marcel Holtmann talking about DBus on kernel, the reception of the audience was very good with few concerns, the fact of upstart requiring DBus to be started early during boot process may make the idea even more compelling than before.

10/10 for LTC

Next, BlueZ meeting.