Saturday, August 8, 2009

KCA 2009

A little late, I know but a couple weeks ago I got back from Kernel Conf Australia in lovely Brisbane, Australia at the Queensland Brain Institute. Talks were great and ranged from the userland to the deep kernel, from introductions to hard technical details.

The thing that stood out the most to me was the collaboration between the communities. I was pleased to see OpenBSD, FreeBSD, (Open)Solaris and Linux people mingling and talking about the relative solutions to various problems without turning in to the one-upmanship often seen in online debates on the subject.

It was also a much smaller conference from what I've attended before and that's a good thing, the attendees got a chance to meet and interact with each other much more than at for example CommunityONE.

One of my favourite talks was Pawel's talk on GEOM, largely because I didn't know it exists and the talk was on how it works. Also David Gwynn's slides, for the sole reason of using Lego to represent data structures. They were good talks anyways, but the Lego pushed it over the top.

I did a talk on the basics of writing drivers in (Open)Solaris which I thought was well received. I got several questions afterwards asking for suggestions on unsupported hardware to give a start.

Obligatory pictures:

Local fauna


Local Flora:


Town square:


Pancake Church (serves liquor until midnight):


Lunch!


Brendan Gregg, Garrett D'Amore & Alan Hargreaves debating something: