Linux Con -- Day 2

Thursday morning was the keynote from Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger at IBM. His memories of Linux ascendancy were interesting...possibly because of the cheerleading/"We would simply prevail" feeling I felt. But his speculation on what would come was fuzzy and handwavy...slides with things like "Smart retail / Smart traffic/ Smart cities / Smart regions / Smart planet / Intelligent oil field technology" (wait, what happened to smart?) and graphs of Efficiency vs. Transformation, with a handy downward-sloping line delineating "Reinventing Business" from "Rethinking IT", just made THE RAGE come on.

The HP speech that came after wasn't much better, so I ducked out after five minutes...perhaps a mistake, in retrospective. I will say, though, that it amazes me that multitasking, in 2011, is something to brag about.

Next up was the presentation from IBM on "Improving Storage in KVM-based clouds". Despite teh buzzwords, it boiled down to an interesting war story about debugging crappy FS performance, from verifying ("Yes, the users are right when they say it sucks") to fixes ("This long-term kernel project will add the feature we need to stop sucking!"). If I can find the slides, I highly recommend reading them...there's a lot of practical advice in there.

Next up was a presentation by the mysteriously-employed Christoph on Linux in the world of finance. It was a short presentation -- a lot of presentations at LinuxCon have been short -- but he made up for it with a lively Q&A afterward. (To be fair, he explained at the beginning that he was used to a much more hostile/loud audience and a much more interactive presentation style, and actively solicited questions.)

Right, so: Linux is used in finance a lot, because it's fast and very, very tweakable. He describes this as "Linux hotrodding", that seems to capture the attitude very well. Sadly, a lot of this stays in-house because these tweaks are considered part of the "secret sauce" that makes them money.

I asked if the traders were involved in the technical side of things, or if it was more like "Let me know when my brilliant algorithm is sufficiently fast." Answer: no, traders are very, very technical (some give keynotes at tech conferences), and there is very tight integration between the two. I asked if the culture was as loud, macho and aggressive as the stereotype. Answer: yes. Someone asked why Solaris usage had declined. Answer: neither traders ("You got bought! You're a loser!") nor techies ("Oracle kills MySQL and puppies!") liked Oracle buying Sun.

And now for an opposing view.

I spoke after the talk to three sysadmins from the same trading company, and they disputed some of Christoph's points. First, their company contributes back to open source/Free software; their CTO says it's a moral imperative. They've open-sourced their own trading software, though not the algorithms ("algos" if you're a trader type) that make them money. They admit that this makes their company unusual; in their industry, secrecy is the rule.

Second, they said the culture varies from company to company, and that anyhow it's very different now that MIT PhDs and such are being hired. It's not all "Wall Street".

And one bit they confirmed: hotrodding. Things like overclocking their chips -- but to the degree that the vendors phone them up to say "You'll burn out your CPU in a week!" Response: "Okay." Because it'll make more money in the first hour it's running than the CPU costs.

I had lunch with Chris, who I used to work with, and caught up on everything. Then I hung out in the vendor area a bit. The PandaBoard was neat: Ubuntu 10.10, playing a 1080p movie trailer and drawing less than two watts. Incredible.

I buttonholed the FreeIPA guy; complimented him on the talk, and asked some questions. Master-slave in FreeIPA LDAP server? No, multi-master only. Doesn't that make you nervous? No. Doesn't keeping config information for the LDAP server in LDAP, rather than a plain text file, make you nervous? Shrug; if you can't read LDAP, you're probably hosed anyway. Oh, and btrfs is coming to Fedora 17, probably RHEL 7. Doesn't that make you nervous? No. (Conclusion for the home listeners: I am a misinformed worrywart.)

And Rik van Riel was there, but I forgot to hug him.

In the afternoon I went to a two-hour introduction to KVM-based virtualization. This was excellent; while I'm using KVM at the moment, I'm not familiar with the tools available. (Which probably means I shouldn't be using it....) He covered tools like virt-p2v, KSM, and how to monitor performance of VMs from the host, even if you don't have root privileges. Good stuff.