Kernel Conference Australia

Kernel Conference Australia is an Open Source kernel-focused technical conference to be held in Australia, from July 15th to 17th, 2009.

Our venue is the Queensland Brain Institute. Situated in Brisbane, QBI is part of the University of Queensland.

Conference website now active

http://au.sun.com/sunnews/events/2009/kernel/index.jsp

Registrations open on 4 May 2009.

Call for Papers — closed!

The Call for Papers closed on 1 May 2009 KCA2009 - Call for Papers

Presentations have been accepted

The review committee has finalised the list of accepted presentations and notified authors. Once the authors confirm their acceptance and availability, we'll get the agenda updated with all the details.

Web2.0 and pre-Web1.0 interaction now active!

We've got a Facebook event setup, and an irc channel #kca2009 on irc.freenode.net.

Why have a kernel-focused conference?

At present there is no technical conference focused on Operating System
kernel research or practice which occurs in Australia or New Zealand.
People who wish to attend a conference of this nature are forced to travel
either to the US and Canada, or to Europe.

While there is the annual Linux.conf.au event, it is heavily focused on
linux as one would expect, and a review of presentations at past LCAs shows
that approximately one quarter of the content is devoted to linux
kernel-level topics.

The other major annual conference of note in Australia and New Zealand is
run by SAGE-AU, but a review of their content for the past 10 years shows
minimal interest in kernel-level topics.

Finally, there is the Australian Unix Users' Group (AUUG) conference,
however AUUG is in the process of being wound up and is unlikely to run any
more conferences in the future.

What we propose is a conference (which we hope to grow into an annual
event) which is focused on Open Source kernels and the technologies which
we find within those kernels. We are soliciting presentations in a variety
of areas (see below), all of which are both of current and long-standing
interest to many people.

Some potential topics for presentations include:

• Cross-architecture kernel development
• Porting an OS to a new architecture
• Filesystems
• System performance visualisation (DTrace, SystemTap?)
• Image visualisation (GPU kernels)
• Fault Management
• (globally) Distributed kernel development - how to make it work
• Virtualisation
• Clustering (HPC and High Availability)
• Distributed systems
• Kernel Testing - methodologies, interesting problems found
• Traps and pitfalls found when porting drivers between OSes
• Realtime performance and scheduling
• Embedded OSes and drivers (including control systems)
• Patents and Open Source
• The state of OS kernel research / what's new / work in progress

Apart from the above, we expect that pretty much any kernel-focused topic for an Open Source Licensed OS will be considered by the organising committee.

Target OSes

• OpenSolaris
• FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD
• linux
• minix
• research OSes (L4 variants, GNU HURD etc etc)

Invited speakers:

• Jeff Bonwick (Sun - ZFS, confirmed)
• Gavin Maltby (Sun - FMA, confirmed)
• Bill Moore (Sun - ZFS, confirmed)
• Sherry Moore (Sun - Intel/AMD work, confirmed)
• Maxim Alt (Intel, confirmed)
• Adam Leventhal (Sun - FishWorks/DTrace, not confirmed)
• Brendan Gregg (Sun - FishWorks/DTrace)
• Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD - not confirmed)
• Pawel Jakub Dawidek (FreeBSD - ZFS, confirmed)
• Noel Dellafano (Apple - ZFS, to be confirmed)

Keynotes:

• Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore (Sun)
• Maxim Alt (Intel)

Panels

• ZFS (Sun / Apple / FreeBSD)
• DTrace ?
• Virtualisation ?