Report from the All Systems Go conference

asg2019 conference

In the end of September (2019) I visited the All Systems Go conference. The official slogan is “The open source community #conference focused on foundational user-space #Linux technologies”, in other words what is often refered to as “Linux Plumbing”.

My impression is that it doesn’t focus on a specific industry (unlike for example Embedded Linux Conference where you can also find alot of plumbing related discussions), but of course things might get a bit skewed if presenters are working on similar things. Companies that are heavily invested in this is for example Facebook and Kinvolk. Both with a cloud and container focus, which might not be my personal biggest interest but it’s always interesting to get a different perspective and also think about which parts can be reused for other purposes. The general feeling was that this year can be summarized like “containers, containers, containsers and (e)BPF”.

Listening in on anything related to systemd is ofcoures always interesting and this year maybe the most interesting and potentially controversial one might be about systemd-homed and the visions for it.

Every time I go to a conference I always try to go to one “wildcard” speach. I try to find an unallocated slot in my personal schedule where I find a talk about something that I might not be particularly interested in but has a crazy enough description which makes you wonder how it even fits in. This year my wildcard choice became the GNU Poke talk which was awesome and it has since been hyped by people like GregKH and described as the most impressive presentation ever seen! It’s always a great fealing listening to a talk where the presenter is both humble but also very excited about their work.

There was also a great presentation by the same person on BPF in the GNU toolchain And another talk from Facebook also related to BPF (and systemd): https://media.ccc.de/v/ASG2019-144-custom-cgroup-bpf-programs-in-systemd

The talk I brought home to my fellow embedded interested collegues where the great one about using bringing up an STM32 with only free tools, which was both a good introduction to the tools and also some deep details about how STM32 works.

Lots of work still seems to be needed still to bring docker kicking and screaming into the brave new cgroups2 worlds.

Some other notable talks I went to that you might want to look at if you want to know the latest state of things in that area:

Other videos are available at https://media.ccc.de/c/asg2019 and on Youtube. More info also available on the ASGConf twitter.


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