LinuxCon Japan 2011 | Presentations

LKML Survival Guide (For Repressed Asian Geeks)

Date: Wednesday, June 1st
Time: 3:30pm
Location: Room 501

LKML and the mainline kernel development community tend to be very direct and often hostile. A lot of talented people struggle and, combined with the language barrier, it can be especially challenging for Asians who often don't have enough experience with such style of communication. As a proud member of the repressed Asian geek demography, I'd like to talk about how the mainline development works with emphasis on communication and share some ideas and tips which have been helpful to me. The 'repressed Asian' part is a bit of joke on the assumption that there will be a lot of Asian engineers, so, regardless of ethnic group, the target audience is primarily people who have some experience with kernel development and are wanting to participate more actively in mainline development.

Tejun Heo, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics

Tejun has been working on various aspects of Linux kernel since 2005. I'm one of the most active kernel developers and enjoy jumping around across different subsystems. The subsystems he has worked on include libata, SCSI, block layer, percpu memory allocator, workqueue and x86. Tejun intends to keep doing it for the foreseeable future. He currently work as a technical advisor for Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, which uses Linux in both experimental and computational setups. His duties are helping HPC cluster admins when they have kernel related issues and keeping developing kernel. These days, besides the usual libata, workqueue and percpu allocator maintenance, Tejun is mostly working on x86 NUMA cleanup and ptrace improvements.