LinuxCon, Day 3

Friday morning I pretty much skipped the keynotes. While waiting for the tutorials to start up, I got buttonholed by Kurt von Fink of the MariaDB project. Nice guy, and he pretty much convinced to take a serious look at it. I'd been dithering about whether to attend the talk on it in the afternoon, and decided it was worth my while.

First tutorial, though, was the Filesystem Tuning talk by Christoph Hellwig. After some minor problems (geek presentation tech problems mean 47 people in the audience shouting out suggestions for xrandr flags), the talk began...and ho boy, I took notes furiously during this one. He concentrated on ext4 and XFS, adding the disclaimer that he's an XFVS developer/fan. Hopefully his slides will be up soon; if not, I'll type up my notes RSN.

Okay, one quote/summary: do not buy a cheap RAID controller -- ie, anything without a battery-backed cache. Why not? Because you'll be doing stuff you could do with mdadm and running it on an undebugged RTOS, which itself will be running on a tiny, underpowered ARM chip.

In the afternoon was the Bufferbloat talk. Here are some links for you to look at while I come up with more summarizationalism of the talk itself:

• Slashdot article
• Wikipedia article
• I, Cringely article

I've got a lot of reading to do there.