Join OpenPOWER Foundation at linux.conf.au

By Hugh Blemings**,** Executive Director, OpenPOWER Foundation

In a few hours I’ll board a flight to beautiful Christchurch, New Zealand, the home next week of this year’s linux.conf.au. I’m fortunate enough to have attended every LCA as well as spoken at a few and it remains, in my view, one of the preeminent technical open source conferences in the world.

This year will be no different; again LCA has attracted speakers and attendees from all around the globe. The theme for 2019 is the use of free open source software and hardware with emphasis on Internet of Things, security, privacy, environment, communication, health and ethics.

Ably assisted by some smart folk from the community, I’ll be leading an OpenPOWER Bird of Feather session at the conference. Given the growing interest in open hardware for medium to high-end compute and OpenPOWER in general, I think it’s a particularly timely session. Oh and I’ll have a Raptor Computing Systems Blackbird POWER9 Motherboard for show and tell too!

There are other sessions on the agenda that the OpenPOWER community will be interested in:

• Reliable Linux Kernel Crash Dump with Micro-Controller Assistance – an overview of the concept, design, implementation and learning, from a framework that allows for guaranteed capture of the memory state of both the crashed Linux kernel and the OPAL firmware it runs on.
• Clang Built Linux – a demonstration of how to build a kernel with clang and an overview of remaining work to be done.
• Booting faster – covers the efforts over the past several years into making POWER based systems boot faster. A full stack deep dive into what it takes to cold (and warm) boot (and reboot) a system.
• Bugs in your server – will demonstrate methods of gaining complete, persistent control of the BMC using a variety of useful hardware features.
• Taking it to the Nest Level – Nested KVM on the POWER9 Processor – delving into the rational behind developing software to support nested virtualization and the implementation details associated with it.
• Climbing the Summit with Open Source and POWER9 – an overview of the experience of developing Summit, the world’s fastest supercomputer, and how open source is used with POWER9.
• Petitboot: Linux in the Bootloader – will cover the Petitboot bootloader – what it is, how it works, the positives and the challenges of delivering an open source bootloader, how it fits in with the current bootloader ecosystem, and where Petitboot could go in the future.

If you’re attending linux.conf.au, let me know on Twitter @hughhalf and come and say hi!