LinuxCon 2010 Day one
It’s been a little over 24hrs since my arrival in Boston and my first day of LinxCon 2010 has come to a close. It been an interesting crowd to mill around with. I’ve seen everything from PR people to journalists to software developers and even spoken with someone who is working with the virtualization instructions sets from AMD. The net has been cast wide here the variety of the catch is staggering.
There was a run of keynotes to start of the morning. Jim Zemlin from The Linux Foundation kicked off the day with an announcement of efforts underway to simplify the license compliance that goes along with running linux underpinnings. I think this will go a long way in helping companies feel better about using opensource software and make it that much easier to justify it as a choice. Wim Coekaerts then hopped up and tried to put everyone at ease that Oracle wasn’t going to be all about Solaris now and that Oracle is  still heavily invested in linux, which is one of the things I’d been wondering since the Sun acquisition. He was followed by Rob Chandhok of Qualcomm who gave some light their usage of linux and some of QuICs (Qualcomm Innovation Center) interest and contributions past, present and future to the platform.
A refill of coffee and it was off to my first session which was Oracle Database Performance on on Intel Linux Servers. I had debated internally about going to this or the two session Linux System Monitoring Tutorial and if I had it to do all over again I”d probably go to that instead. The talk by Steve Shaw was fast and packed with a couple of tidbits of information but nothing that I found overly insightful. Check your NUMA settings, use hyperthreading, more memory sticks can lower the memory speed and benchmark the hell out of everything. The constant comparison of on board SSDs behind a controller to SAN disk seemed a bit silly to me and I would have in fact expected a much greater gain in performance than was shown considering the tradeoffs in effect. Still it was a decent talk and I’ve got a couple of good things to go back and look at so I can’t complain that loudly.
Second session was Building Scalable and Cost Effective Clusters with Linux by Nguyen Chinh and I really enjoyed the talk. Half the time the audience seemed to be doing a WTF on what his setup was. It was essentially 100ish Core i7 desktop in a 10×15 room stacked vertically to create a HPC cluster. This is probably one of the few presentations I’ll see this week that will be a  true representation of what linux can do. Generally people that are cobbling together systems on a tight budget aren’t going to be the ones dropping the cash to fly to Boston for a week of a conference. I imagine though that there are far more installations of these crazy ass piece and part setups then the pretty package setups we’ll see in other presentations. Chinh managed to setup a fairly powerful HPC cluster on a very small budget and do so in a way that makes it fairly easy to service. It was a fun presentation.
Back to my room for lunch of Broadway’s Best Pizza (which was really good) and checking up on work email and the new Greenplum clusters one of my coworker is wiring up.
Oracle VM was my third session of the day and I’m looking forward to finding out more about that. Working with Redhat Xen starting about 4 years back was great, but painful to do some of the things at command line. I’m very interested in the VM suite Oracle has going and it’s price point. It will be interesting to see how it compares with VMWare and with some of the storage API work Oracle is working on it could make for a powerful solution.
The best session of my day was the last one, a panel of Linux journalists batting back and forth a few topics. A couple of interesting take aways. It’s getting harder to report on linux because it  is everywhere. Once the technology becomes a part of day to day life there’s not much reporting to be done on it. How many late breaking stories are there on radio at this point in time?  So the dazzle factor of X release software package Y which now runs on linux, is all but dead. It seems to that the talk of linux on the desktop has died over the past couple of years, because the battle isn’t really for the desktop at this point it’s for the next device. Is that your mobile phone running Android or possibly a slate running ChromeOS, maybe it’s too soon to tell.  This session with this panel could have gone on four a good two hours easily and there were so many hands with questions there could have been another two hour Q&A session. It was a great panel and a good session for me to end my day on.
I cut out a bit early to head down to Davis Square to meetup with a friend that goes all the way back to elementary school. I talked him out of BBQ ( I’m from KC I don’t want any stinking Boston BBQ) and instead we hit a little Irish pub and we caught up on much of what’s happened over the past few years.
Tomorrow looks like an interesting day and the pain point of the schedule is that Chris Mason will be talking on Btrfs at the same time as Monty Widenius will have a slot on MariaDB, I want to see both damnit. There’s a harbor cruise for the group I still need to see if there’s still openings for too, must remember to check that out bright and early.