I’m on my way home from Düsseldorf where I attended the LinuxCon Europe and Linux Plumber conferences. I was quite surprised how huge LinuxCon was, there were about 1.500 people there! Certainly much more than last year in New Orleans.

Containers (in both LXC and docker flavors) are the Big Thing everybody talks about and works with these days; there was hardly a presentation where these weren’t mentioned at all, and (what felt like) half of the presentations were either how to improve these, or how to use these technologies to solve problems. For example, some people/companies really take LXC to the max and try to do everything in them including tasks which in the past you had only considered full VMs for, like untrusted third-party tenants. For example there was an interesting talk how to secure networking for containers, and pretty much everyone uses docker or LXC now to deploy workloads, run CI tests. There are projects like “fleet” which manage systemd jobs across an entire cluster of containers (distributed task scheduler) or like project-builder.org which auto-build packages from each commit of projects.

Another common topic is the trend towards building/shipping complete (r/o) system images, atomic updates and all that goodness. The central thing here was certainly “Stateless systems, factory reset, and golden images” which analyzed the common requirements and proposed how to implement this with various package systems and scenarios. In my opinion this is certainly the way to go, as our current solution on Ubuntu Touch (i. e. Ubuntu’s system-image) is far too limited and static yet, it doesn’t extend to desktops/servers/cloud workloads at all. It’s also a lot of work to implement this properly, so it’s certainly understandable that we took that shortcut for prototyping and the relatively limited Touch phone environment.

On Plumbers my main occupations were mostly the highly interesting LXC track to see what’s coming in the container world, and the systemd hackfest. On the latter I was again mostly listening (after all, I’m still learning most of the internals there..) and was able to work on some cleanups and improvements like getting rid of some of Debian’s patches and properly run the test suite. It was also great to sync up again with David Zeuthen about the future of udisks and some particular proposed new features. Looks like I’m the de-facto maintainer now, so I’ll need to spend some time soon to review/include/clean up some much requested little features and some fixes.

All in all a great week to meet some fellows of the FOSS world a gain, getting to know a lot of new interesting people and projects, and re-learning to drink beer in the evening (I hardly drink any at home :-P).

If you are interested you can also see my raw notes, but beware that there are mostly just scribbling.

Now, off to next week’s Canonical meeting in Washington, DC!