Random Musings

I’ll try to update this as I go over the day.

Wednesday - 11:30
Sat in on the BlueTooth talk (BlueZ). Interesting, got a rough overview of hardware and what is going on with the stack - and since I’ve only recently started trying to use this, I have high hopes that it will work as easily as it should - i.e, pair with the my mouse once and never worry about it again.

Wednesday - 13:30
Next up was the ACPI talk - plagued by 30 minutes of projector and laptop problems.
Turns out that most of the ACPI problems were not bad BIOSes, but bugs in the ACPI implementation in Linux. A couple people asked for an independent ACPI tester - to use in manufacturing, and/or when shopping for a laptop. Random other things - the basic theme being “It’s getting better than it was before - we think we’re past the worst point of getting compatibility and support working.” Lots of interesting new features in ACPI 3.0 - most of them haven’t shown up in machines yet so there really isn’t much (any) support for them, either. Support in the OS will happen after features start showing up in the BIOS and machines themselves. Some possible new devices, “operator present detector” (Is there a human in front of the machine?), “ambient light” (automatically dim the backlight in a low-light situation). Various physical connection, dependency, architecture things for CPUs.

Wednesday - 15:00
I went to the wrong room next, and sat in on the summary of how page cache performance was analyzed. (The page cache is the cache of things taht are file-backed, IIRC). Interesting, but hard to write about it without just repeating things - so go to http://linuxsymposium.org/ and download the papers yourself.

Wednesday - 18:00
Last up was the Keysigning - where we were, sadly, forced to implement a human merge-sort since the keysigning sheets were sorted by key-id and not by last name. Oh well. Next up to handle the actual signing, which always sucks. Gotta answer so many questions as part of the process.