linux.conf.au 2021
2021-01-23..2021-01-25
-- online --
[linux.conf.au 2020, linux.conf.au 2021, Linux.conf.au 2021 Kernel Miniconf, Linux.conf.au 2021 Systems Administration Miniconf, linux.conf.au 2022]
who it's for
linux system administrators, site reliability engineers, kernel developers, embedded developers, open source community managers, security engineers, devops engineers
topics
Cephadm containerised Ceph management; rootless containers with Podman; Clang-built Linux toolchain updates; open FPGA toolchain with SymbiFlow; wireguard border router deployments; kernel selftest development; TPM attestation and privacy; TLS 1.3 implementation details; cgroup2 resource control strategies; Rust for performance in Mercurial; ARM64 large virtual address support (52-bit); power management for home and devices
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Coming to LCA2021 | Cory Doctorow | 03m |
Argues that because the pandemic turns “involving the internet” into “requiring the internet,” software freedom is the crux of human liberty and getting… | ||
| MySQL for System Administrators | der.hans | 15m |
Practical checklist for admins: show your prompt with mysql_ps1 so you never run commands on the wrong server; avoid command-line passwords and use .my.cnf or… | ||
| Tips and Tricks for Managing and Administering Ceph Clusters | Michael Hackett | 16m |
Cephadm (Octopus) provisions a containerized Ceph cluster from bootstrap to working MON and manager in about two minutes and then adds hosts over SSH, with the… | ||
| Building Raspberry PI Supercomputers | Federico Lucifredi | 22m |
Live tutorial runs one or two Raspberry Pi clusters and focuses on management not hardware, showing a working PicoCluster rack, image choices (Raspbian vs… | ||
| Rootless containers with Podman | Steven Ellis | 19m |
Deploys Home Assistant and Mosquitto containers rootless with Podman 2.x + slirp4netns, using subuid/subgid mappings and mapped host volumes with SELinux… | ||
| Hacking Hardware for Hugs and Profit! | Leon Wright | 21m |
Late-night dorm hack turns into a badge that reliably detects 700–1000 ms hugs using an ESP8266 → ESP32 upgrade and VL6180X time-of-flight sensors… | ||
| ClangBuiltLinux: What's Next? | Nick Desaulniers | 19m |
ClangBuiltLinux reports that 2020 focused on CI coverage (KernelCI, TuxSuite, Red Hat CKI, GitHub Actions) and production adoption, moving Google’s server… | ||
| Conference Opening | Sae Ra Germaine, Joel Addison | 08m |
Welcome to linux.conf.au 2021 with a land acknowledgement, a run-down of logistics and concrete details about the program and support. Four concurrent stages… | ||
| Library Map: how generous is your open data? | Hugh Rundle | 16m |
An interactive Library Map of Australian public library locations, rules and collections maps services across states and territories using a CSV-first workflow… | ||
| Keynote: Cognitive Apprenticeship - Experience in Open Source | Omoju Miller | 38m |
Shows that the Event Horizon Telescope relied on more than 21,000 direct and dependency contributors and a GitHub sample averages 74,403 community… | ||
| Open Source FPGA Tooling, Our Journey from Resistance to Adoption | Tim Saxe, Brian Faith | 42m |
A QuickFeather development board connects to an Adafruit PM2.5 sensor and a LoRa radio while the USB peripheral is implemented in the FPGA using an open… | ||
| Unpacking History with Omeka | Molly Tebo, Tricia McKenzie | 23m |
During lockdown the State Library of Western Australia rebuilds several legacy education sites into a single Omeka S installation, producing a suite of… | ||
| Building my own border router + a wireguard love story | Arjen Lentz | 45m |
Builds a fanless Debian 10 border router on a PC Engines APU4d4 with 4x Gbit ports and PCIe SSD, using PPPoE over VLAN2 for NBN and kernel sysctl tuning to… | ||
| Sunday Welcome | Joel Addison, Sae Ra Germaine | 08m |
Welcome and housekeeping details for Day Two outline sponsors IBM Google Arm and Red Hat, list of in‑kind sponsors and a RedBubble swag store link, plus Rego… | ||
| How to write your first kernel selftest | Michael Ellerman | 20m |
Kernel selftests are small userspace programs (mostly C, some shell) placed under tools/testing/selftests that exercise the running kernel; they build locally… | ||
| GKernelCI v.2 new features and KernelCI compatibility | Alice Ferrazzi | 20m |
GKernelCI v2 standardizes Gentoo kernel testing by moving the build/test pipeline into Docker environments and integrating LAVA for device-backed runs; it… | ||
| The worst outage I never caused | Julien Goodwin | 18m |
A mistaken config change nearly stops most of Google from being advertised to the internet by removing a critical routing flag, which would have taken effect… | ||
| Linux Testing made better with DATA | Nageswara Sastry | 15m |
Uses ctags to index kernel functions and a G code tool to collect per-test code coverage, stores source and test databases, and runs a Jenkins job that parses… | ||
| Getting started with LinuxBoot Firmware on AArch64 Server | Naohiro Tamura | 21m |
Boots CentOS 8.2 AArch64 from LinuxBoot flashrom in QEMU on x86_64 by building a single 15 MB uncompressed kernel with u-root initramfs, patching OVMF to 32 MB… | ||
| Makerspace Adelaide | Robyn Willison | 15m |
A compact walkthrough of Makerspace Adelaide lists concrete kit and funding: a Trotec-donated laser cutter, rows of 3D printers with a heating bed and… | ||
| Getting started with Docker and Swarm | Matthew Cengia | 14m |
Shows how to move from ad hoc VM setups to reproducible containers using concrete commands and files: runs docker run --rm -it ubuntu bash, builds a Dockerfile… | ||
| Keynote: Software Freedom is Essential to Human Freedom | Cory Doctorow | 46m |
Argues that software freedom equals human freedom and supports that with historical specifics: breakup of AT&T and IBM’s antitrust woes in the 1980s… | ||
| Move Slow and Try Not to Break Each Other | Deb Nicholson | 46m |
Sustainable open source prioritizes people over frantic shipping and requires concrete practices: publish and repeat your goals (share your mission on the… | ||
| Supporting BPF in the GNU Toolchain | Jose E. Marchesi | 45m |
GNU toolchain now produces usable BPF object files: upstreamed support in GCC, binutils (assembler/disassembler/linker), GDB and a GNU simulator; Debian and… | ||
| Mathematics and development of fast TLS handshakes | Alexander Krizhanovsky | 43m |
Tempesta TLS implements kernel-space TLS handshakes by forking mbed TLS, grafting bits from WolfSSL, and rewriting crypto hot paths (assembly for big-int math)… | ||
| Monday Welcome | David Bell | 06m |
Welcome back to Day Three of linux.conf.au 2021 with an explicit land acknowledgement, sponsor roll call and concrete actions: 15 trees per speaker are being… | ||
| Overcoming the limitations of the POSIX shell command language | Curtis Millar | 42m |
Implements function scope via stacked variable prefixes by saving/restoring variables with a depth counter and eval, fixes the install_many bug in the demo… | ||
| A New Type of Instruction for Power | Jordan Niethe | 41m |
Power10 adds double-length prefixed instructions (32-bit prefix + 32-bit suffix) requiring the kernel to stop treating instructions as u32 and instead… | ||
| Collabora Online & Mobile | Michael Meeks | 41m |
Collabora Online ports LibreOffice technology into browsers and phones by wrapping the core with a C/C++ header-only API, pushing tiled pixels and document… | ||
| Transparent Open Source AI Video Analytics with Panfrost | Aaron Boxer, Marcus Edel | 46m |
Pure open-source stack running on Rock Pi 4 uses the Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs, TensorFlow Lite with the TensorFlow Lite GLES delegate and an ONNX-based… | ||
| Microwatt grows up | Paul Mackerras | 47m |
Microwatt is an open POWER core that now boots Linux on an Arty A7 and runs at about 100 MHz with 256 MB RAM; development uses GHDL, yosys/nextpnr for ECP5 and… | ||
| Developing an IoT Sensor Network for Civic Applications | Paul Schulz | 46m |
Port Adelaide Enfield libraries build a community LoRaWAN sensor network that actually sends live readings into a Raspberry Pi stack (Raspberry Pi running… | ||
| The privacy aspect of TPM attestation | Imran Desai, Peter Huewe | 41m |
Explains how TPM2.0 attestation produces signed PCR values via PCR extend and quote and how privacy is preserved by using credential activation to prove an… | ||
| Implementing Diverse and Inclusive Codes of Conduct | Matthew Cengia | 46m |
Codes of conduct serve to protect marginalized members by naming scope, unacceptable behaviours, consequences and a reporting process that lists specific… | ||
| TLSv1.3 from scratch | Joel Sing | 45m |
LibreSSL implements TLS 1.3 by writing a new stack from scratch: roughly 7,000 lines of C produced by three people over several six‑week sprints, with the… | ||
| Containers are hideously undebuggable black boxes and we never should have invented them | Tim Serong | 45m |
Ceph migrates packaged daemons to containers (Podman/Docker/Kubernetes) using cephadm and Rook, which eases deployment but adds indirection: troubleshooting… | ||
| Swagbadge 101: Software and the Aiko framework | Nicola Nye, Andy Gelme | 47m |
Hands-on guide to the Swagbadge: a Wi‑Fi badge built around a LOLIN Lite ESP32 running MicroPython and the Aiko framework that provides OLED drivers, event… | ||
| API != REST - procmail to the rescue | Bruno Cornec, Frédéric Passeron | 21m |
A web front end on Netlify sends SMTP messages to a private JupyterHub host which uses Postfix and procmail rules to parse subject/body and invoke scripts… | ||
| Natakanu - An Indigenous-led, open source, peer to peer software project. | Mauve Signweaver, Ariel Beaudoin-Lambert, Genevieve Sioui, Mailys Flamand, Stéphane Nepton | 31m |
Natakanu builds an Indigenous-led, open source, local-first peer-to-peer file-sharing app that runs offline on a cheap router and two laptops, uses Hypercore +… | ||
| So you're a Linux kernel developer? Name all subsystems. | Pia Eichinger, Ralf Ramsauer, Stefanie Scherzinger, Wolfgang Mauerer | 41m |
Researchers mine MAINTAINERS and git history to build a section graph where vertices are maintainer sections and edges mean shared lines of code; they run… | ||
| Open Journal Matcher: open journal discovery for everyone | Mark Eaton | 20m |
A web app that matches a draft abstract to open access journals is live and working: it compares a user abstract against about 5600 DOAJ journals (limited to… | ||
| KUnit: Past, Present, and Future | David Gow | 45m |
KUnit is an in-kernel unit test framework merged in Linux 5.5 that runs small C tests built into the kernel or as modules, and outputs KTAP. It provides… | ||
| Swagbadge 101: Hardware and SAOs | John Spencer | 46m |
Conference badge built around a Lolin32 (ESP32) running MicroPython with only five main parts: Lolin32 (ESP32), two 0.96" I2C OLEDs, and two buttons, and about… | ||
| Keynote: The Story Behind Blinka | Limor Fried | 01h 05m |
A history of how Blinka becomes a cross‑platform hardware API: Adafruit_Blinka implements a strict subset of CPython so the same CircuitPython drivers run on… | ||
| What even is code? Building a non-code coding interface | Katie Bell | 46m |
Builds a tree-first, non-text editor called Sploot Code that parses to an AST and exposes node insert/delete/wrap operations instead of typing punctuation… | ||
| Life Amongst the Authentica-ceans 🦀 | William Brown | 45m |
Overview of Kanidm: an open source IDM written in Rust with a REST‑first API, LDAP gateway and PAM/NSS modules, RADIUS support, and native WebAuthn support for… | ||
| Digital Sovereignty: We need devices we truly own more than ever | Paul Gardner-Stephen | 46m |
Argues that liberal democracies face a coming digital winter unless users can run hardware and networks they truly control, and shows concrete work: a… | ||
| GO GLAM wrap: What did we learn today and what's next? | Hugh Rundle, Bonnie Wildie | 18m |
Wrap-up reports that the natakanu project starts from a community‑identified problem and builds solutions with users, not for them; open journal manager is… | ||
| Teaching an old Bovine Gnu Tricks: What's next for Emacs? | Jeffrey Walsh | 46m |
A GTK3/GDK port replaces Emacs’s old X-centric display path with a pure GTK3 GDK backend using Cairo, solving Wayland quirks (no global coordinates) by… | ||
| Essential-8 Security in Practice with Kubernetes | Tishampati Dhar | 44m |
Kubernetes cluster stack is codified as terraform modules (github datacube-k8s-eks) with Helm charts, Flux GitOps and Trivy image scans, Cilium network… | ||
| Introduction to Ethics from an Ethicist-in-Training | M. de Blanc | 46m |
Quick tour of practical ethics that frames decisions as tradeoffs not truths, using trolley/self-driving car scenarios to compare consequentialist… | ||
| How To Get A Project Unstuck -- And Fixing The Skill Gaps That Got Us Here | Sumana Harihareswara | 47m |
Shows concrete playbooks: consolidate scattered to‑dos (sprinted Mailman 3.0 by posting 10 blockers on a wall, then released within a week), use a… | ||
| It's (not) down in the noise. | Peter Chubb | 39m |
Argument: use the Mann‑Whitney U test to prove small kernel performance changes are real, not “down in the noise.” Kernel microbenchmarks show skewed… | ||
| Arkisto: an open-source, standards-based framework for digital preservation | Mike Lynch | 36m |
Uses OCFL for immutable versioned storage and RO‑Crate (JSON‑LD + schema.org) for dataset metadata; files live on disk or object storage and are indexed with… | ||
| Server platforms: experiment with your expensive hardware too! | Jeremy Kerr | 42m |
Identifies the on‑board AST2500 BMC (ARM11 @800MHz, ~512MB RAM) as a modifiable Linux host, finds TTL serial pads and the BMC SPI flash with a logic probe, and… | ||
| Disaster recovery for event organisers | Christopher Neugebauer | 47m |
Three conference case studies show concrete choices and outcomes: a venue move secured after a one‑in‑40‑year Brisbane flood 12 days before the event, a… | ||
| cgroup2 Resource Control strategies w/ resctl-demo | Tejun Heo | 42m |
An interactive terminal demo reproduces Facebook production surprises: a memory leak that previously dropped web RPS to near zero for ~40 minutes instead… | ||
| The business value of Open Source - more than just publishing source code | Toby Bellwood | 47m |
amazee.io open-sources Lagoon (released Aug 2017) and uses it to automate Kubernetes for hosted Drupal, WordPress, Django and Node sites, claiming the platform… | ||
| Creating Intelligent Music Instruments with Machine Learning | Charles Martin | 41m |
Research builds handheld, embodied instruments that run small predictive RNNs (typically 32 units) on a Raspberry Pi or single‑board computer and use mixture… | ||
| Join us: AU & NZ regional chapter of AI4LAM | Liz Ragamouf | 20m |
A regional AI4LAM chapter for Australia and New Zealand launches in 2020 and runs a dedicated Slack channel and webinar series that already includes a session… | ||
| More voice, less choice: The rise of voice interfaces and the decline of open source voice | Kathy Reid | 45m |
Claim: by 2023 there will be about 8 billion voice assistants, but that scale comes with shrinking choice. Open projects like CMU Sphinx move commercial… | ||
| Evolution of Suspend-to-Idle Support in The Linux Kernel | Rafael Wysocki | 47m |
Describes how suspend-to-idle is introduced in 2013 and implemented in Linux 3.13 then hardened through concrete fixes: the irq subsystem marks wakeup lines… | ||
| Taking a step back: Analysing your documentation | Lana Brindley | 37m |
A practical workflow for a doc spring clean: gather everything (repo, release notes, code comments, blogs, support threads, marketing), interview contributors… | ||
| Patently Obvious - The year that lawyers came to FOSS | Neil McGovern | 36m |
August 2019 lawsuit alleges that Shotwell infringes a broad imaging patent filed by Rothschild Patent Imaging (Lee Rothschild), prompting a legal defense that… | ||
| HiFive Unmatched Software and Hardware | Keith Packard | 37m |
SiFive’s mini‑ITX RISC‑V desktop called HiFive Unmatched is a FU740-based board: quad RV64 cores (rv64gc feature set), bumped to 16GB soldered DDR4, NVMe M.2… | ||
| Flying robots, a wonderful obsession | Andrew Tridgell | 43m |
ArduPilot now supports tiny 100 g micro‑drones up to machines over a tonne, with over 70 flight controllers, hundreds of thousands of vehicles flying, 16,000+… | ||
| Swagbadge test jig and software & OHMC wrap-up | Jonathan Oxer, Andy Gelme | 22m |
Parts fail at scale so every OLED gets pretested (OLED yield ~8.7% failure), Lowlands show ~2% failure, giving a combined pass of about 81.7% if unchecked, so… | ||
| A re-introduction to s3fs | Andrew Gaul | 16m |
s3fs mounts S3 via FUSE and is useful when POSIX access to object storage is required but not when low-latency small updates or huge directory listings matter… | ||
| Sacrebleu - PowerShell on Linux! | Kieran Jacobsen | 45m |
PowerShell 7.1/7 (open source) adds concrete features: pipeline parallelization (example run drops from ~8 minutes to <2 by default 5 parallel jobs), new… | ||
| Linux and Zephyr, sitting in a tree (literally!) | Christopher J Biggs | 47m |
Zephyr RTOS runs on small MCUs while a Linux box acts as a Raspberry Pi as VPN gateway to reach field devices over Bluetooth, LoRa or 4G/NB‑IoT; provisioning… | ||
| We made a beautiful complete open-hardware computer, including keyboard and injection-moulded case | Paul Gardner-Stephen | 48m |
A complete open‑hardware MEGA65 is produced: a custom motherboard (Xilinx 200T plus Max10 and Lattice), a full mechanical keyboard with double-shot top and… | ||
| Once more with feeling: Relevant tech skills for GLAMR workers | Liz Stokes | 34m |
Argues that GLAMR staff can gain practical skills—command line, Python/R, scripting, version control and automation—to reduce reliance on proprietary tools and… | ||
| An introduction to Vircadia - an Open Source desktop and VR metaverse | Vadim Troshchinskiy | 46m |
An open source metaverse platform that is a fork of High Fidelity and released under Apache 2.0, Vircadia runs on Linux/Windows/Mac, uses C++/Qt5 with… | ||
| Veracruz: Privacy-preserving mutliparty computation using trusted hardware | Derek Miller | 35m |
Veracruz is a working prototype that runs secret programs on secret inputs inside WebAssembly sandboxes hosted in trusted execution environments, using TLS… | ||
| Dieter RAMs: the ten principles of good API design | Leigh Brenecki | 46m |
Applies Dieter Rams’ ten design principles to real APIs and developer tools, arguing that progressive disclosure and focused docs (tutorials that give… | ||
| FPGA Design with Chisel | Josh Bassett | 40m |
Chisel is a Scala-based HDL that generates Verilog (outputs Verilog) and brings implicit clock and reset semantics, a real type system and reusable bundle… | ||
| futex2: An update | André Almeida | 15m |
futex2 is a new syscall interface that reimplements futex with one-call-per-operation, NUMA-awareness, and variable-sized futexes; a prototype is integrated… | ||
| How a major museum runs on Linux | Simon Loffler | 10m |
ACMI runs a museum-wide system called The Lens that uses Linux, Python and Raspberry Pi hardware to power 160 screens and 420 interactive devices for a 10-year… | ||
| I can stop adding more LEDs anytime I want, I just choose not to | Marc Merlin | 17m |
Starts with a tri‑color Arduino LED and escalates to wearable and wall panels, claiming one common codebase runs across Arduino, ESP8266, ESP32 and Raspberry… | ||
| A Comprehensive Strategic Plan for Copyleft Freedom on Linux | Bradley M. Kuhn | 43m |
Conservancy claims GPL compliance is dire: for years most Linux-based IoT devices fail to provide buildable source and the last two years yield virtually no… | ||
| Ten Years of Outreachy! | Karen M. Sandler | 45m |
Outreachy celebrates ten years of remote paid internships running twice a year, has placed over 750 interns with a >90% internship completion rate, and reports… | ||
| Open ISAs (RISC-V, OpenPOWER, etc) | Alistair Francis, Hugh Blemings | 42m |
RISC-V and OpenPOWER move from experiments to deployable stacks: RISC-V toolchains and distros (GCC/LLVM, glibc, Debian/Fedora) now boot on QEMU and silicon… | ||
| The Privacy Tax: How tracking and hacking affect disabled people, and what we can do about it | Dawn E. Collett | 48m |
Surveillance ranges from CCTV and cookies to centralized health databases, and data-driven systems routinely classify disability in ways that increase risk… | ||
| UI Text: Simplicity is Difficult | Mike Jang | 47m |
Practical guide to trimming “walls of text” in product UIs: ten concrete steps, a checklist for committing copy into front-end code, and a living UI text style… | ||
| Power Management in the home | Alastair D'Silva | 38m |
Home system runs 26.5 kW of PV and ~25 kWh of battery storage, monitored with an SDM630V2 three‑phase Modbus meter on an Orange Pi over RS‑485 feeding Open… | ||
| What's next for Bluetooth in PulseAudio? | Sanchayan Maity | 36m |
PulseAudio currently only ships the mandatory SBC codec, and work adds real codec support by plugging GStreamer into the stack: a LDAC encoder plugin is… | ||
| Large Virtual Address support (52-bit) in ARM64 kernel | Bhupesh Sharma | 44m |
Linux mainline (since 5.4) gains 52-bit VA/PA (ARMv8.2 LVA/LPA) support enabling up to 4 PB addresses but only with 64K page size, 3-level page tables; the… | ||
| Let’s Use An Automated Theorem Prover To Verify Video Games; I Swear This Is More Fun Than It Sounds | Jon Manning | 34m |
Uses the Z3 SMT solver via its Python API to encode RPG decision variables (booleans and integers), check satisfiability of intertwined win conditions, and… | ||
| A journey to performance: using Rust in Mercurial | Raphaël Gomès | 46m |
Mercurial replaces its flat dirstate with a compact, mmap-backed, append-only tree and rewrites hot paths in Rust, using Rayon and crossbeam for parallel… | ||
| Conference Close | Sae Ra Germaine, Joel Addison | 22m |
Conference close summarises awards, stats and logistics: the Rusty Wrench goes to Ryan Verna for building an open-source AV/video stack that cuts production… | ||
| Radio Astronomy for Programmers | Mars Buttfield-Addison | 45m |
Fast-paced primer that shows how to go from raw signals to tracked objects: uses TLEs pulled from Space‑Track/Celestrak, predicts orbits with sgp4 (and… | ||
| nothing matches | ||