In late October 2011 I had the opportunity to attend the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) in Prague, Czech Republic as a representative of the elinux.org community, sponsored by Linux Foundation. As a new member of the MontaVista team, I’d attended the North American version of the same conference in San Francisco in April 2011 and made an effort to meet up with as many Meld.org community members as possible and spread the word about current and upcoming MontaVista Linux SDKs. At ELCE, I continued this effort and tried to engage in conversation with community members to understand what they wanted from an embedded Linux online community. Although I was sidelined for some time with illness, I did my best to attend as much as I could. It was a challenging conference for me, but I was grateful for the opportunity and to share my impressions here.
The theme of ELCE was centered around the 20th anniversary of Linux. In attendance were community personalities including Linus Torvalds, Dirk Hohndel, Theodore Ts’o, Alan Cox, etc. etc. To list all the kernel developers present would take an article unto itself. Needless to say, the presence of so many Linux “celebrities” added a certain buzz to the conference. The opening keynote kernel panel consisted of Linus, Alan Cox, Thomas Gleixner, and Paul McKenney being subjected to Questions from both the moderator, Lennart Poettering and audience members. What I assumed would be a discussion of present technical issues in kernel development and glimpses into the future turned into a discussion about the inevitable ageing of the core kernel development team. Although this wasn’t the content I was hoping for, it is a somewhat contentious subject within the kernel development community. My impression from the answers given by Linus and the like is that it’s not really an issue at all. Yes, core developers are ageing, but there are many new, young developers participating as well. The general idea that a young developer can simply jump into kernel development and contribute significantly is waning as the kernel grows in complexity. Not to say that the latter is impossible, it’s just become less common. However, the young kernel hackers are climbing the kernel development learning curve, it’s just that the curve has increased.
Another interesting amount of content centered around the history of Linux, and in particular the experiences of kernel developers in the early days. Dirk Hohndel presented a Day 2 keynote describing his experiences in those early days. Dirk stressed that in those days there was no grand plan of world domination, no prescient ideas about where Linux could go, but rather a series of challenging, fun technical problems that needed to be solved. He, Linus and the other early contributors were having fun. Each day consisted of trying to see what problem could be solved that day, like getting a new piece of hardware to come up, or adding a new tool. Community was always the key to the success of Linux.
Most of the big players in the Embedded Linux space were present at ELCE. The Yocto Project, Linaro, RedHat, Intel, Texas Instruments, Sony, etc. etc. indicating that a lot of Embedded Linux development continues to be sponsored by these organizations. MontaVista played a role as well, with developer Klaas van Gend hosting the closing comments and games. Klaas bravely opened a web server to gather game answers during the closing session which was playfully hacked by a member of the crowd. But Klaas was not deterred, restored his server and soldiered on with a very entertaining closing session.
The 2011 Embedded Linux Conference Europe was a qualified success for me, even though I was not able to attend many talks due to illness. The Embedded Linux community presence was strong, demonstrating its health and the continued growth of Embedded Linux development everywhere.
Linux Foundation will hold the next Embedded Linux Conference in Redwood Shores, California from February 15th-17th, 2012.
* Presentation from ELCE can be found on the elinux.org wiki.
* The conference schedule can be found on the Linux Foundation event page.
