I’ve just got back from a busy week at the Linaro Developer Summit in Budapest. At the last LDS we decided that we wanted to integrate the activities of the TSC (Technical Steering Committee) into the developer summit, rather than have a parallel event. We were successful, but boy was I busy.
On the technical side, I concentrated on the memory management and kernel upstreaming sessions. Both were about the wider ARM Linux community coming together to solve problems. Memory management is a problem that will take a while to solve, but I think that we have a good direction and, as importantly, a bunch of engineering that we can get going on now. Kernel upstreaming is as much about how we accelerate the rate of ARM kernel consolidation as how the ARM Linux maintainers organise themselves and interact with the rest of the Linux community.
In the run up to LDS, the TSC had been working hard to evolve Linaro’s high level requirements, so at LDS we chose to take a step back and look at how we manage those requirements more efficiently. The problem here is that Linaro has grown very rapidly in this last short year. The first time we were at UDS (and Linaro wasn’t quite born), there were around 50 of us, at the first LDS there were around 100 and this time I believe that there were 200 of us. In other words, we’ve doubled our presence every 6 months. In a similar way, the complexity of the requirements we’re dealing with and the problems that we’re trying to solve is doubling too, so we need to do things differently.
Of course, it wasn’t all work. The evenings were spent socializing with friends old and new and seeing some of Budapest, a lovely old city.
Dave
