/devices/pseudo/bitbucket@0:bitbucket: Musings from the bitbucket

Over the years it's been a source of frustration for me that the conferences which I wanted to attend were either too expensive (time, travel, registration etc) or not covering topics I was interested in.

Late last year I realised I should stop grumbling about it and fix it myself.

So it is with great pleasure that I can announce that this July 15th to 17th in Brisbane, there will be an Open Source kernel-focused conference: Kernel Conference Australia. We don't have absolutely all of the organisational bits together yet, but here's what we do have:

World class speakers

• Jeff Bonwick (Sun, ZFS)


• Bill Moore (Sun, ZFS)


• Sherry Moore (Sun, x64 guru)


• Gavin Maltby (Sun, FMA guru)


• Dave Stewart (Intel, OpenSolaris group)

Fantastic location

Our venue is the Queensland Brain Institute, within the University of Queensland.

Excellent climate

The University is situated in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Yes, it will be winter... but winter in Brisbane is a beautiful time to visit.

Call for Papers

The Call for Papers is not quite ready (still a few details to be ironed out), but if you'd like to be considered for a presentation spot you should be thinking about a topic in any of these areas:

• 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 (of course!)


• The BSD family FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD


• Linux


• minix


• research OSes (L4 variants, GNU HURD etc etc)

If you would like to help with sponsoring the conference, please let me know via email (jmcp at my employer . com).