linux.conf.au 2022
2022-01-14..2022-01-16
-- 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 kernel developers, system administrators, embedded developers, open source contributors, devops engineers, security engineers, infrastructure engineers
topics
eBPF fundamentals; RCU torture testing; kernel hardening for 32-bit ARM; thread_info into task_struct migration; futex2 state and work; systemd user namespaces and chown() handling; VM and container integration patterns; Flask + Elasticsearch API deployment with Terraform; Micro-ROS on ESP32 and STM32 with FreeRTOS; FPGA toolchain: SymbiFlow yosys nextpnr and DFU over USB
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| The early days of Unix at Bell Labs | Brian Kernighan | 49m |
Chronicles Unix growing from a tiny PDP-7 experiment into a production system on a PDP-11 that ships a usable Sixth Edition by 1975 with about 9,000 lines of… | ||
| Saturday Welcome | Miles Goodhew | 07m |
Welcome and housekeeping outlines: acknowledgement of Nunawa land and First Nations, sponsors listed as IBM Google ARM Red Hat SUSE Thinkstream and… | ||
| Citation Network Analysis from Scratch | Claire Daniel | 30m |
Step-by-step recipe for reproducing a citation network: pull reference lists from Scopus via its API or open Crossref dumps (Crossref open citations grows from… | ||
| The Conflict and Burnout Survival Guide: Handling When Things Go Wrong | Jono Bacon | 45m |
Outlines a three-layer triangle of suck: crisis, conflict, burnout, with concrete workflows for each. For crises: stop the rot, investigate, short-term fixes… | ||
| How we opened up our private museum collection API | Simon Loffler | 27m |
ACMI opens a public collection API that serves a snapshot of its works metadata (about 42,000 works) by publishing JSON files in the same repo as the API so… | ||
| MicroROS, combining advanced robotics and low-cost embedded systems | Brett Downing | 34m |
Micro-ROS runs ROS 2 natively on tiny controllers so you can push real-time I/O and simple control onto devices like ESP32 and STM32 while heavy planning stays… | ||
| When things go wrong and how we fix them | Jonathan Oxer, Andy Gelme | 34m |
FPGA badge hardware runs into three concrete failures and the fixes used: a stencil ordered with apertures on the wrong side is patched by covering holes with… | ||
| The Rockling FPGA Audio processor and Theremin SAO and Party Button SAO | Andy Gelme, Jonathan Oxer | 33m |
Rockling is a small UP5K FPGA board with about 5000 LUTs and 128 KB RAM that ships with an audio front end, an AD/DA codec, eight DSP blocks and a soft RISC‑V… | ||
| So you want to torture RCU? | Paul E. McKenney | 30m |
rcutorture runs kernel-module tests that build kernels, create guest VMs and run 19 concurrent scenarios to stress RCU, using scripts like kvm.sh /… | ||
| Bringing WebM Alpha support to GStreamer | Nicolas Dufresne | 41m |
Retro alpha uses two VP8/VP9 tracks packed into WebM with a per-frame block addition flagged by an alpha mode tag so the second stream carries luma-as-alpha… | ||
| Kernel Hardening for 32-bit Arm Processors | Keith Packard | 46m |
Describes removing thread_info moved into task_struct on 32‑bit ARM so per‑thread metadata leaves the kernel stack, using the user/global fallbacks plus… | ||
| Let’s Make a Game | Paris Buttfield-Addison | 45m |
Demonstrates the free open source Godot engine as a real Unity/Unreal competitor, builds and runs a tiny 3D game that exports to macOS Windows and Linux. Uses… | ||
| Electrifying the Knitted Universe | Sarah Spencer | 44m |
Hacked a 1980s domestic knitting machine into a networked printer (Raspberry Pi + custom board) and knits a 4.6 m wide star map from 15 kg of wool over ~100… | ||
| To the Cloud and Beyond, Accessing Files Remotely from Linux via SMB3.1.1 | Namjae Jeon | 30m |
Linux CIFS client and a new kernel server ksmbd (merged around 5.15) add SMB3.1.1 features: kernel-side AES-256 encryption, RDMA/smbdirect and multichannel… | ||
| eBPF 101 | Muhammad Falak R Wani | 31m |
Introduction to eBPF covers the actual lifecycle: write user-space C, compile to eBPF bytecode, load via the bpf syscall and attach to hook points like… | ||
| Avoiding DNS Pain | Kieran Jacobsen | 28m |
DNS outages and attacks rise year on year with real incidents at Azure, Akamai and AWS and one global outage that exposes fragility; dangling DNS entries… | ||
| Hardware design of the OHMC2022 Rockling & Swag Badge and OHMC close | Robert Powers | 30m |
Hardware shows the Rockling badge design choices, what was reused, and what actually worked: the analog front end is stole analog front end from Gowdy Labs and… | ||
| Musicbrainz.org and wikidata.org | Daniel Sobey | 24m |
musicbrainz.org is a user‑edited music database that stores releases, release groups, recordings, works, labels and instruments using UUIDs for disambiguation… | ||
| Meaningful Bounds Checking in the Linux Kernel | Kees Cook | 46m |
Audit of recent kernel CVEs finds 11 memcpy overflows (including BleedingTooth) that the compiler could have caught by using __builtin_object_size mode 1… | ||
| When STEM Becomes STEAM We All Benefit: Breaking out of our professional silos | Yvonne Perkins | 40m |
Argues for replacing STEM with STEAM and shows concrete experiments: teaching non-programmers to use the Trove API with Excel via step‑by‑step documentation… | ||
| Send in the chown()s - systemd containers in user namespaces | Fraser Tweedale | 45m |
Runs systemd inside a single “monolithic” container on Kubernetes/OpenShift by enabling user namespaces so root in-container maps to host uid 200000 with a… | ||
| A mechanism to isolate CPU topology information in the Linux kernel -- CPU Namespace | Pratik Rajesh Sampat, Gautham R. Shenoy | 32m |
Proposal implements a kernel-level CPU namespace that maps namespace CPU IDs to real logical CPUs (proof-of-concept patches, new clone flag to create… | ||
| Upstream Accessibility: A Contributor's Guide | Dawn E. Collett | 46m |
Shows why >50% of public websites are inaccessible with concrete examples: Yarra Trams has low‑floor trams on only about half its routes and most stops are… | ||
| Kernel Testing with KUnit: Bridging the Gap | David Gow | 30m |
Compares KUnit and kselftest for when to test functions versus system behavior, explains that KUnit adds kunit_tool QEMU support and cross‑compile flags so… | ||
| VMs + Containers = The Perfect Wedding | Sreejith Anujan | 31m |
Shows a working KubeVirt setup using KubeVirt and OpenShift Virtualization on OpenShift 4.6 / Kubernetes 1.19, running KVM/libvirt inside pods. Demonstrates a… | ||
| (Ab)using GitHub Actions for building & testing kernels | Russell Currey | 29m |
Shows how GitHub Actions runs kernel builds and tests at scale using unlimited free compute, with concrete recipes: workflow YAML, hosted Ubuntu runners (2… | ||
| Paperback: A Digital Will and Backup System for the Reasonably Paranoid | Aleksa Sarai | 42m |
Paperback is a paper-first digital-will and backup system that actually implements Shamir Secret Sharing to split a ChaCha20-Poly1305 encrypted payload, signs… | ||
| Useful Reality - Assistive wearable tech on a budget | Christopher J Biggs | 35m |
Claims a usable assistive wearable AR stack for about $500 instead of $5,000, built from off‑the‑shelf parts: a single‑board computer (banana pi zero or… | ||
| A year in the life of GTK | Emmanuele Bassi | 46m |
GTK 4 ships in December 2020 and since then the project delivers two minor releases, a new GL-based renderer (OpenGL by default, Cairo fallback) plus a… | ||
| Live and synchronous! Contribute to the Open Practice Library. | Donna Benjamin | 35m |
The Open Practice Library is a fork of MobiusLoop that adds a culture+technology foundation, hosts over 160 practices under CC licenses, and keeps code on… | ||
| Conference Opening | Miles Goodhew | 21m |
A traditional Welcome to Country opens with clapsticks and a short ceremony invoking ancestral spirits to provide physical and spiritual protection, asking… | ||
| Qiskit: Building a quantum computing community | Anna Phan | 45m |
Qiskit is an open-source Python SDK that runs on cloud quantum hardware (public five‑qubit access to larger devices, partners like Honeywell AQT and IonQ… | ||
| Roll for Initiative: how to make the world of AI a more ethical place | J. Rosenbaum | 47m |
PhD work shows how to de-bias a GAN by altering training data and retraining, and the speaker reports using generated 3D humans and StyleGAN instead of real… | ||
| Visualising and tracing requests through a cluster: Intergrating OpenTracing into OpenStack Swift | Matthew Oliver | 46m |
Built a Swift WSGI middleware and trace mixin that injects OpenTracing context into requests, records spans across proxy/account/container/object pipelines and… | ||
| Footguns and factorisation: how to make users of your cryptographic library successful | Lindsay Holmwood | 47m |
Open source studies show concrete failures: Python and Android experiments find 20% of submitted code insecure while developers believe it's safe; analysis of… | ||
| On the Importance of Visibility | Allan Shone | 31m |
A team builds a composable monitoring tool of AWS Lambda functions that queries CloudWatch, checks known internal IPs and drops findings into Slack; messages… | ||
| Velociraptor - Dig Deeper in Linux | Mike Cohen | 46m |
Velociraptor deploys agents to thousands of endpoints (demo shows ~1,000) and uses its query language VQL to run parsing, binary decoding and yara carving… | ||
| Building an Ephemeral World | Steven Ellis | 45m |
Compares ImageBuilder (osbuild-composer) for full OS images and Buildah for containers, showing a live demo that composes a qcow2 VM image (about four to five… | ||
| Election Night Analysis: Art or Science | Antony Green | 33m |
Uses AEC polling-place XML and historical booth data fed into an ABC database (now running on Amazon) to predict seat outcomes by computing match two candidate… | ||
| What C and C++ can do and when do you need Assembly? | Alexander Krizhanovsky | 46m |
Shows generated code from GCC and Clang using Compiler Explorer and llvm-mca and compares actual x86-64 microops, latencies and timelines; replacing large… | ||
| MariaDB Database per user, on demand (aka systemd multi-instance socket activated) | Daniel Black | 28m |
Demonstrates a reproducible setup that runs one MariaDB server per Linux user using systemd templates and a few MariaDB code tweaks so instances are… | ||
| Learning about slightly more advanced networking with linux | Paul C. Warren | 25m |
Linux can act as a full router: create VLANs with ip link add and tag up to 4096 VLAN IDs, assign addresses, and firewall between them; run userland routing… | ||
| Playtime with configuration: from script to galaxy | Ser Heang Tan | 30m |
Chronicles migration from brittle ssh+shell scripts to Ansible playbooks, showing a live demo that first runs scripts via the script module then rewrites tasks… | ||
| Made to Measure? The Biases and Boundaries of Biometrics | Lilly Ryan | 43m |
A sweep from 19th‑century phrenology and Galton’s eugenics to modern sensor stacks shows how measuring bodies keeps slipping into social control: employers… | ||
| What does Linux Australia do all year? | Julien Goodwin, Sae Ra Germaine | 31m |
Linux Australia acts as the corporate backbone for linux.conf.au, PyCon AU and many LUGs, handling governance, insurance (public, directors, volunteer… | ||
| Why your encrypted Database isn't secure: practical attacks against encrypted OSS databases | Dan Draper | 34m |
Shows concrete failures: transparent data encryption protects nothing — SQL injection reads plaintext from an encrypted RDS because the DB decrypts on boot… | ||
| Communities are systems: What can systems thinking teach us when it comes to communities? | Batya Friedman | 39m |
Argues that communities function as interconnected systems and uses concrete systems-thinking tools — purposeful systems, stocks and flows, cardinality and… | ||
| NorNet – A Linux- and Open-Source-Software-based International Platform for Networking Research | Thomas Dreibholz | 44m |
NorNet is an open international testbed running Linux with KVM and LXC hosts, BTRFS storage and per-ISP source-based routing tables (ip rule + multiple routing… | ||
| The Security Community Expressed As Too Many Venn Diagrams | Casey Schaufler | 44m |
Argument that the security community literally births computing technology, tracing cryptography -> mechanical and electronic code machines -> early computers… | ||
| Engineering Kindness | John Contad | 40m |
Argues that intentional artifacts change culture: a tiny sensible defaults repo (folders + README + short MDs) captures on‑ramp norms, a structured incident… | ||
| gprofng: The Next Generation GNU Profiling Tool | Ruud van der Pas | 45m |
gprofng is a sampling profiler (default 10 ms sampling) that collects profiles from unmodified Linux binaries — no recompilation or instrumentation — and shows… | ||
| More than words: Reviewing and updating your information architecture | Lana Brindley | 27m |
Create a content map of the top three levels (spreadsheet or table), classify pages by DITA: concepts/tasks/reference, and run one‑on‑one interviews plus a… | ||
| How to run Python in the browser | Katie Bell | 45m |
Compiles CPython to WebAssembly (using pyodide) and runs it in a worker thread so the UI stays responsive, connects stdout/stderr to xterm.js, and implements… | ||
| Integration, data sharing, opensource, and the agtech startup ecosystem | Lyndsey Jackson | 37m |
A startup reengineers a vineyard app into a geospatial tasking and tracking system that uses phone GPS to record tractor paths, defines prescription zones for… | ||
| Cultivating Production Excellence | Liz Fong Jones | 58m |
Argues for measurable production excellence: set SLIs/SLOs (example target 99.9% over 30 days), compute an error budget (1/1,000 requests → 10,000… | ||
| Producing an open font in 2022 | Andy Fitzsimon | 45m |
A practical walkthrough of producing an open font in 2022: use free editors like FontForge, Runebender or commercial Glyphs/FontLab, compile with fontmake and… | ||
| Merging an existing framework into KernelCI | Alice Ferrazzi | 33m |
Merges the Civil Infrastructure Platform testing framework and Gentoo’s GKernelCI into KernelCI’s native system, moving a 21-board CIP lab onto KernelCI’s… | ||
| Memory management with MMTk: lessons learned from replacing Ruby's garbage collector | Angus Atkinson | 40m |
Integrates the Rust-ported MMTk into MRI by building a MMTk binding that replaces Ruby’s allocator calls, starting with a deliberately simple no-GC prototype… | ||
| Sunday Welcome | Miles Goodhew | 07m |
Conference opens with an acknowledgement of Nunawaa land and First Nations peoples, a roll call of sponsors including IBM and Google, plus Arm, Red Hat… | ||
| Virtual Events: Behind the scenes of an engaging community conference | Ryan Verner | 40m |
A backstage system and volunteer workflow reproduces physical venue roles and yields broadcast-quality online sessions across multiple rooms, live and… | ||
| How To Annoy The Government With FOI Requests | Justin Warren | 47m |
Explains how to use the Freedom of Information Act to extract documents (not just answers), shows tools like righttoknow.org.au and Zotero, and cites legal… | ||
| Intro to Swagbadge 2022, the SAOs and the software | Andy Gelme, Jonathan Oxer, Nicola Nye | 26m |
Hardware kit ships a redesigned rectangular swag badge with one larger OLED, touch sliders and preserved SAO mount points, and it includes two simple add-ons… | ||
| State of futex2 | André Almeida | 21m |
A new futex2 syscall family actually adds specific operations rather than overloading one call: merged in Linux 5.16 is a dedicated syscall that implements… | ||
| “Why are they asking me to do this?” or Adventures in IR Land | Gyle dela Cruz | 27m |
X‑Force finds a spike in Linux malware in 2020 with more cryptominers and ransomware and Linux variants of Defray/REvil‑like families; response uses the NIST… | ||
| Moving to self managed OA publishing | jessie lymn | 29m |
The society moves Archives and Manuscripts from Taylor & Francis to a self‑managed gold OA model, ending the T&F contract 31 Dec 2021 and replacing paywalled… | ||
| Open Hardware Weather Radar | Tishampati Dhar | 34m |
Builds an experimental microwave radar system using LimeSDR and FPGAs with frequency doublers and power amplifiers targeting ISM bands around 2.5, 5 and 10 GHz… | ||
| Automating hardware test & measurement | Julien Goodwin | 31m |
A Python datalogger controls a GPIB USB multimeter and an I2C chain via a USB–I2C bridge to sweep a DAC that tunes a digitally controlled ovenized crystal… | ||
| Performance Testing of Prometheus Based Metric Platforms | Brian Groux | 38m |
Hootsuite builds a Locust-based test framework (a custom Locust with aiohttp client and a dashboard JSON generator) that replays Grafana behavior by serially… | ||
| Developing, testing and deploying open infrastructure with Zuul for the OpenDev collabatory | Ian Wienand | 45m |
OpenDev runs a fully open gitops pipeline that builds a python 3.9 container, pushes it to a build-set and an intermediate registry, then exercises… | ||
| 20 years of NSA Security Enhanced Linux, a Retrospective | Russell Coker | 46m |
Maintains SELinux in Debian for 20 years, describes how initial prototype takes three months to work locally and a year to be usable by others, drives kernel… | ||
| WHAT Was Too Slow?!? (When sprintf() Is A Performance Bottleneck) | David Fetter | 27m |
Identifies sprintf as a PostgreSQL export bottleneck and replaces divide-based digit counting with precomputed tables plus bit ops, cutting per-integer work to… | ||
| Persistent Memory plus RDMA, new age remote device | Xiao Yang | 28m |
Persistent memory offers DRAM-like latency plus nonvolatility, but plain RDMA lacks guarantees for durability and atomic updates; this work implements RDMA… | ||
| Some tentative first steps towards a Star Trek universal communicator | Greg Baker | 44m |
Builds a tiny-data pipeline that extracts lexicons and grammar rules instead of training on millions of sentence pairs. Leaftop currently auto-extracts about… | ||
| GStreamer and ROS a tale of two messaging frameworks | Brett Downing | 47m |
Contrast between frameworks becomes concrete: a bridge is built that embeds a ROS node inside a GStreamer element and also launches GStreamer pipelines from… | ||
| Boldly Going, Running Linux in Space | Sam Bishop | 47m |
Linux runs core avionics and payloads across hundreds of satellites, claiming 40.5% of active satellites by late 2021 largely from Starlink and Planet Labs… | ||
| Open Source/Hardware has changed Retro Computing | Randall Crook | 46m |
Open source projects turn scarce retro parts into usable systems: RGB-to-HDMI lets an Amiga 500 output flicker-free HDMI; a PiStorm is a Raspberry Pi + CPLD… | ||
| Compact C Type Format in the GNU Toolchain | Indu Bhagat, Nick Alcock | 40m |
Added CTF support lands across the GNU toolchain: GCC emits CTF, the linker performs fast type deduplication, binutils can dump and a GNU poke description… | ||
| Automation for Debian Packaging | Jelmer Vernooij | 45m |
A web scheduler called Debian Janitor runs automated fixes across Git repositories using lintian-brush scripts and the silver-platter runner, creating or… | ||
| Confessions of a Crypto Miner | Tishampati Dhar | 19m |
Describes installing a CPU miner then scaling to 20 GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs (Antminers, an Eisen bought for ~$200 and later resold for ~$2,000), flashing… | ||
| Conference Close | Miles Goodhew | 19m |
Virtual door prizes award a one-year Sizzle subscription to Tim Palmer and a No Starch Press voucher to Cheryl Collett; the Rusty Wrench goes to dive lane… | ||
| The seL4 Foundation – growing through upheaval | Gernot Heiser | 44m |
seL4 is a ~10–15k line C microkernel with machine-checked proofs of functional correctness, binary translation and security enforcement, open-sourced under… | ||
| Becoming a tyrant: Implementing secure boot in embedded devices | Irving Tjiptowarsono | 42m |
Describes implementing secure boot on embedded SoMs by trusting vendor boot ROM, burning e-fuses burned to lock stages, using signed U-Boot FIT image to verify… | ||
| Add depth! Stereoscopic imagery for everyone | Florian Haas | 47m |
Explains making real stereograms with ordinary gear: two handheld photos by shifting weight (roughly shoulder-width baseline), or 3D video from one moving… | ||
| nothing matches | ||