Keith Packard

Bdale and Keith love to design, build, and fly high-power model rockets. They even started a small business together to manufacture completely open design hflight computers and related electronics that are now widely-known, used, and respected in the rocketry hobby. What not everyone knows is the role that Debian plays in all of this! Punctuated by many cool pictures and videos of rockets, Bdale and Keith will explain how Debian is part of every aspect of their involvement in the rocketry hobby and Altus Metrum, LLC.

Other people: Bdale Garbee

Running games on Debian often means compromising the integrity of our systems by dual-booting non-free operating systems or installing non-free drivers on our Debian systems. This presentation will describe some work sponsored by the Valve Corporation aimed at helping make this situation better. We're working on improving the free Mesa implementation of the Vulkan API for AMD hardware, fixing support for Head Mounted Displays, and improving X support for animated applications. All of this work is (naturally) being done in the open within the context of the relevant free software projects.

An opportunity to meet the members of the Debian Technical Committee who are in attendance at Debconf, hear the status of open issues, and discuss pending and future issues with the committee. URLs: https://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte

Other people: Didier Raboud Philip Hands David Bremner Margarita Manterola Tollef Fog Heen Sam Hartman

Memory-Driven Computing, as demonstrated in The Machine prototype, offers a radical transformation in computing hardware, breaking down old barriers between memory and storage, and across operating systems instances. We've been building on Debian to explore how software could use the hardware, building a storage management layer and offering inter-system collaboration mechanisms through the memory fabric. Our current project, Linux for Memory-Driven Computing, expands on our previous work by offering portability to more hardware platforms, both real and virtual. This software is delivered as a set of packages which install on top of an existing Debian Buster system. This talk will describe our 'Manifesting System' (which builds customized operating system images for each node), and how the system deals with errors in massive amounts of memory, and how we plan to make containers take advantage of Memory-Driven Computing to speed application deployment. The talk will conclude with some future ideas about managing a tightly coupled multi-node memory driven system.

The Machine is a hardware project at Hewlett Packard Enterprise which takes a new look at computer architecture. With many processors and large amounts of directly addressable storage, The Machine program has offered an equally large opportunity for developing new system software. Our team at HPE has spent the better part of two years writing new software and adapting existing software to expose the capabilities of the hardware to application developers.

Taking off from my presentation at LCA 2016, this presentation will explore the changes we've made throughout the Linux environment, from security infrastructure to new file systems.

As directly addressable storage is such a large part of the new hardware, this presentation will focus on a couple of important bits of free software which expose that to applications, including our Librarian File System and Managed Data Structures libraries.

Managed Data Structures introduces a new application programming paradigm where the application works directly on the stable storage form for data structures, eliminating serialization and de-serialization operations.

Finally, the presentation will describe how the hardware is managed, from sequencing power to a rack full of high-performance computing hardware, through constructing custom Linux operating systems for each processor and managing all of them as parts of a single computing platform.

Bdale and Keith have been working on the design of an inexpensive yet robust, completely open design, hardware random number generator. At Debconf in Portland two years ago, Tom Marble gave a talk about the earliest prototypes and then state of the project. Happily, we now have a design we consider worthy of taking to production. This talk will describe the hardware design, kernel device driver, and current production status of Chaoskey.

Other people: Bdale Garbee

An opportunity to meet the members of the Debian Technical Committee who are in attendance at Debconf, hear the status of open issues, and discuss pending and future issues with the committee. URLs: https://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte

Other people: Didier Raboud Andi Barth Tollef Fog Heen Philip Hands Sam Hartman

Due to a cancelled flight, Keith is not able to make it to FOSDEM this year. This talk will therefor not be taking place.

The X Composite extension opened up a wealth of possibilities for enhancing the free software desktop, however it came with a cost in performance and power -- extra memory used by applications and extra copies of that memory from application buffers to the screen. This presentation will describe and demonstrate enhancements to the Present extension which can eliminate most of these additional copies, and with suitable kernel and application changes, eliminate even more copies for non full-screen double buffered applications.

Version 1.12 of the X server is scheduled to be released in early March, shortly after FOSDEM occurs. The talk will cover what has changed since 1.11, including multi-touch support, and a raft of code cleanups to try and bring the server out of the last century. Beyond 1.12, this presentation will outline further work planned for the Linux desktop. How X and Wayland will work together, the work remaining to support OpenGL 3.0 and beyond within the X environment and further plans to streamline and modernize the code base.

I've written a modest desktop application to manage my Altus Metrum rocketry electronics. The first implementation used C and Gtk+. I eventually gave up on that implementation and started over using Java and Swing. The application now consists of about 25kloc using a collection of external java packages for things like speech synthesis, graphing and mapping. This presentation will describe what my experience with Gtk+ was like and why I was motivated to start over.