FOSS.in Day 5 (The Last Day)
Opening Mood: Good Morning.
Opening Song: Boondein - Silk Route
The last and final Day of FOSS.in had some really interesting talks.
I missed the talk by Andrew Cowie, since we reached the venue pretty late. However, I managed to catch the next talk by Ulrich Drepper, the person whose article on Memory management I thought was brilliant. The talk was on “Contributing to Linux Runtime”. One of the interesting things that Ulrich mentioned was that he is looking for a new malloc implementation, one which is NUMA aware. This would really be a nice thing to work on, but I hope even applications understand the concept of NUMA so that they don’t move the threads around from one node to another.
After the lunch, we had Rusty’s talk on Talloc. Talloc stands for Tridge-Allocator, or Tree-Allocator is a hierarchial memory allocator which can be a really useful thing to prevents memory leaks owing to the programmer’s forgetfulness. There were about 150 people in a hall whose capacity was 120. I sneaked into the projector room to catch that talk and got into the hall only for the Q & A session ( I won one of those caramello koalas!). You can find the Talloc details here –> http://talloc.samba.org/
I chose to attend Amit Shah’s KVM talk over Thomas’s Real-time talk. I was hoping to see some meaty details about the KVM way of doing virtualization. But unfortunately most people in the audience had problems visualizing virtualization in the first place. So it ended up as a demo session. I guess, since the code is available, I will have to just go over it.
The concluding ceremony had “Rusty and a Merry Band of FOSS hackers” (Doesn’t that remind you of some rebel group in some corner of the Sherwood forest?) talking to the audience and sharing their experiences with open source. He showed us how easy it was for anyone to go ahead and contribute to open source projects, by asking one of the volunteers to come over and send a Documentation patch for lguest. You can find that here –> http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/12/8/49
I had to leave early to help prepare for Sunday’s barbecue. That however is another story for some other time 
Closing Song: Village Damsel - Indian Ocean.
Closing Mood: Power Aware!
