Older blog entries for amits (starting at number 63)

Quotable Quotes and Videos from FUDCon Pune 2011

Jared Smith: 'Our biggest enemy is ourselves'

Sitaram Chamarty: 'English is never going to be as precise as perl or shell. That's my biggest problem in life.'

Joerg Simon (kital): 'The event was really smooth.  All talks started on time, with German precision.  Almost feels like a German event.'  (In an offline chat with me).

Jared Smith: 'Best FUDPub EVER!' (on-video, off-video, in multiple locations, in multiple voices)

The kpoint folks have the event videos at their site.
This is a post from http://log.amitshah.net/, licensed CC BY-SA.

Syndicated 2011-11-08 10:24:00 (Updated 2011-11-08 10:58:33) from Amit Shah

Gearing Up for FUDCon Pune 2011: Day -2

We're in the final stages now, and things are mostly in place:

  • Website: http://fudcon.in working fine
  • People have started arriving, cabs booked for all coming via Mumbai
    • A couple of them missed their flights, but they're on their way with a new schedule
  • Posters, booklet, banners printed
  • Budget is under control
  • Videographing set up (but will only be available for one room)
  • Hotel and Guest House rooms ready for speakers coming in
  • Lunch and FUDPub menus finalised
And we have an overwhelming response for the conference:
  • About 50 speakers
  • About 60 sessions (talks, demos, workshops, hackfests)
  • Almost 500 registered attendees
  • About 40 volunteers from COEP
Looks like this FUDCon is set to be the biggest in terms of attendance. We've had to propose a draft schedule to avoid confusion with such a huge crowd. The schedule's put up at  http://fudcon.in/program/fudcon_schedule.

What's left?
  • Adding power extension boards for classrooms and auditorium -- scheduled for tomorrow afternoon
  • Checking wifi access at venue.  We have rented a few routers to boost their signals if needed (we think they'll be needed)
  • Setting up banners around the campus -- tomorrow, after classes
Hmm, amidst all this, I have to find time to ready my slides and prepre for my talks. /me runs to get it done.
This is a post from http://log.amitshah.net/, licensed CC BY-SA.

Syndicated 2011-11-02 19:03:00 (Updated 2011-11-02 19:03:34) from Amit Shah

FUDCon Pune: Money Notes

No, this post isn't about FUDCon-branded currency, though we'd love to have those!

In addition to herding cats, I'm also keeping tabs on a spreadsheet that lists the various expenses we will incur and whether we're within our allotted budget.  The summary is that we're doing fine, and are nowhere near declaring bankruptcy (yet).

Right from the start of the FUDCon planning process, Rahul and I have been sitting together, thinking of all the expenses we'd have to incur and the income sources we have. The details were computed on that spreadsheet to begin with and a few highlights were put on the FUDCon wiki.  All this before we even submitted our bid.  We were given a budget of $15,000 from the Fedora Project, and before we submitted our bid, we would have to be sure we could pull the event off.




Now, of course, as the event is almost upon us, we have a much better idea on things and instead of the hand-waving, we have concrete numbers.

Foremost, the folks at the College of Engineering, Pune, the venue for the event, are graciously sponsoring the auditorium as well as classrooms for the talks. They are also sponsoring the Internet bandwidth and electricity.  This takes off a lot of monetary burden from the budget.

In addition to the $15,000 from the Fedora Project, groups within Red Hat Pune have given us an additional $8,000: $2000 from Red Hat GSS and $6000 by Red Hat Engineering (they initially gave us $3000, but later raised by another $3000).

According to current calculations, we're going to be spending $19,047 out of the $23,000 that we have.

The spreadsheet has all the details, of course, but a rough breakdown is:

Travel + Stay: $8918
Food: $1563
FUDPub: $3750
Swag, Banners, Posters: $4088
Infrastructure: $730

Those are the major categories. We're still unsure of the local travel costs (Mumbai - Pune - Mumbai and hotel - venue as well as venue - FUDPub venue), so I've used some rough figures, they should get confirmed by this weekend.

We decided to sponsor speakers and volunteers' lunch on each day, FUDPub (beer + food on Saturday) for speakers and volunteers, travel to/from COEP to FUDPub venue, and travel and stay (includes breakfast) for out-station speakers.

We have some money earmarked for infrastructure (wireless repeaters, access points, power plugs, power extension boards) that we think may be lacking at COEP.

The FUDPub budget got increased a bit recently as we had to hunt for a covered space to host it instead of in the open, as planned earlier. The rainy season may have passed, but the rains are continuing to pour in Pune. The last week has, in fact, recorded the highest rainfall for this season. Scouting for new venues has in fact been a positive thing: we now have a really great place to go to with great facilities (and food, and music, and of course, beer!). This also means we'll have to arrange for some local transportation for ferrying the people from COEP to the FUDPub venue and back, but we believe it all is going to be worth the extra effort and money.

Running this conference is proving to be a real joy ride. It's fun especially because of the tireless and fantastic volunteers. I'll post about all of them in a later note. I don't really want to distract them from their work into re-reading praises about them.

This is a post from http://log.amitshah.net/, licensed CC BY-SA.

Syndicated 2011-10-20 15:54:00 (Updated 2011-10-20 15:54:46) from Amit Shah

FUDCon Pune 2011 F2F Meeting Minutes: 13 Oct


Names in bold have action items against them; please follow up with me / Rahul on progress.

From http://openetherpad.org/ep/pad/view/fudcon-pune-planning/8hnDjIyKnH

13 Oct 2011

Attendees: Amit Shah, Rahul Sundaram, Kashyap Chamarthy, PJP, Saleem Ansari, Shakthi Kannan, Anurag Patel, Satya, Murty, Shreyank, Ramki

  • Design
    • Add COEP, Red Hat logos to banners before printing
    • Suchakra on it
  • Booklet
    • Ankur Sinha on it
    • Welcome letter from Jared received
    • Aiming for completion by this weekend (Oct 16)
  • Call for localisations -- translations of blog posts?
  • Website - Saleem
    • Upgrade tier on hosting - site gets unavailable often
    • To blog about new site and registration / talk submisison there.
  • Catering
    • the places for stalls are identified within COEP campus
    • cucoon requested for an extra room to keep the MRP items as they called them, they don't want to carry things back and forth for 3 days
    • Cucoon wants to setup Staellite Kitchen
      • For heating food
    • TODO: send them a final menu
      • PJP to do this ASAP
    • Setup Coupons for Speaker Lunches
      • Another item for printing
       
  •  Wifi and power supply at COEP - Shreyank
    • the only power points the audi has are near the stage
    • and they have only 2 wifi access points in there.. so they say at max 30 people can be accommodated
    • wifi repeaters/routers -- 30K ~ cost -- Get back to this.
    • the rooms mostly have power points on both sides. Though we'll need the longer extension cords along with the power strips -- We have 14
    • 15 amps junction box -- Mr. Murthy will take a look at it on Saturday.
  • Inauguration ceremony
    • Some traditional welcome and opening for the event
    • Talk from the director
    • Begins at 8
  • TODO on staurday at COEP
    • Electricity checks - Shrink + Murty
    • Wifi Router/ Repeater checks -- Ensure things are working
      • Shrink: ensure there's a wifi signal in the rooms we will be allotted.  This makes sure we only need repeaters / signal boosters or if we need to add routers too.
    • Identify banner sites and sizes to be printed depending on the locations. - Rahul
    • Posters need to be put around the campus
    • Check for viability and setup place for satellite kitchen - PJP + Murty
    • Meet Volunteer team; get them all together once for briefing - pick a suitable time - Rahul
  • FUDPub
    • Need to arrange commute for people from COEP -> FUDPub
    • Anurag handling FUDPub at venue
    • Volunteer team from COEP to be prepped on handling outflow of people from COEP to FUDPub venue.
      • Satya to talk to volunteer team about this
  • Tshirt
    • 15 OCT -- A sample tshirt will be provided.
  • Travel
    • Rahul will send spreadsheet info to Murthy w/ details of international people and their travel schedule.
    • Murty will arrange for cabs for Mumbai-Pune (and back) travel
  • General Volunteer team meeting
    • This saturday -- 15 OCT 2011
  • Fedora Mirror Setup
    • F15, F16, Rawhide trees are synced
    • Saturday(15-OCT) -- to check 
    • Kashyap to work w/ Rahul
  • Talks
  • As we approach final stages, we should have a draft talk schedule ready to avoid last-minute hiccups
    • Should be ready about 10 days before event
  • Coupons for 'Lunch - day 1', 'Lunch - day 2', 'Tshirt', 'Swag' printed and given to participants
    • Still under discussion for best way to do this
  • F16 release too late to produce media; instead have a computer do isotousb conversions for participants
  • countdown timer for blogs?
    • Saleem + Rahul to look at this.
  • Swag
    • Lanyard
      • ₹12 per piece from Venus traders
      • Delivered.
    • Mugs
      • Kushal to get quotes
    • Buttons
      • Kushal to pick logo
  • Registration desk - Satya
    • users need to register during FUDcon
    • Printer, power, laptop, papers and volunteers required for registration desk
    • need to have coupons for 'lunch', 'swag', etc.


  • FAD - Shakthi
  • Videographing
    • No progress -- will drop this.


Deadlines, budgets:
http://goo.gl/H91N1

---------------------------------------------------------


This is a post from http://log.amitshah.net/, licensed CC BY-SA.

Syndicated 2011-10-14 06:02:00 (Updated 2011-10-14 06:02:37) from Amit Shah

KVM Forum 2011 Videos

Videos from the KVM Forum 2011 are being uploaded at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7C0F52E2227156B3

This is a post from http://log.amitshah.net/, licensed CC BY-SA.

Syndicated 2011-10-07 05:22:00 (Updated 2011-10-07 05:22:27) from Amit Shah

FUDCon Pune Planning F2F Minutes: 4 Oct 2011

From
http://openetherpad.org/ep/pad/view/fudcon-pune-planning/GjAzZ26xJ9



 4 Oct 2011
 -------------------
 Attendees: Amit Shah, Rahul Sundaram, Kashyap Chamarthy, PJP, Saleem Ansari, Shakthi Kannan, Anurag

  • Catering
    • Quotation is for min. 150 people; budget is for 100 people sponsored
      • This won't result in a min. payment to the vendor; just an estimate for the vendors to get appropriate amount of food
    • Division of veg/non-veg boxes?
      • Suggestion to caterer for veg box + additional non-veg item for people who need it
        • Will be clarified in Monday's meeting
    • Meeting with cocoon on Monday - PJP
      • All questions to be addressed then
    • Confirm with COEP about stalls at the FAD
  • FUDPub
    • Vendors (place + food) to be notified of day change: Sat instead of Sun
      • At Monday's meeting
    • To confirm with some new vendor for beer on Friday
  • Update on Tshirts
    • Order placed today; to be delivered by 25th Oct
    • Vendor selected: Cavaal Clothing
  • Vertical banner design
    • Suchakra to create this weekend.
    • Generic Fedora design is ready (can be used for other events)
  • Rahul put up speaker guidelines on the wiki
  • As we approach final stages, we should have a draft talk schedule ready to avoid last-minute hiccups
  • Coupons for 'Lunch - day 1', 'Lunch - day 2', 'Tshirt', 'Swag' printed and given to participants
    • Still under discussion for best way to do this
  • F16 release too late to produce media; instead have a computer do isotousb conversions for participants
  • countdown timer for blogs?
    • Saleem + Rahul to look at this.
  • Fedora Mirror
    • Kashayp got the Fedora trees (15, 16, Updates, Rawhide -- i386, x86_64 archs) on a hard disk.
  • Comm. with participants
    • flights
      • locals - two not booked
      • foreign - 3 out of 9 booked; Harish decided to book others. waiting on passport info.
    • Satya handling all other stuff, well on track.
  • Swag
    • Lanyard
      • ₹12 per piece from Venus traders
      • To place order on 4th Oct for 500 pieces- PJP
        • Delivery in a week
    • Mugs
      • Kushal to get quotes
    • Buttons
      • Kushal to pick logo
  • Website Info
  • Registration 
    • users need to register during FUDcon
    • Printer, power, laptop, papers and volunteers required for registration desk
    • need to have coupons for 'lunch', 'swag', etc.

  • FAD - Shakthi
    • Two FADs now scheduled
    • 1st on 24th Sep at RH office - done
    • 2nd run on 8th of October at COEP
      • https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_Pune_2011
      • Check power sockets
        • Should get a big 15A power points; connection should be from COEP mains
        • Get 3-4 of the 15A ones
        • Get 10-15 smaller ones
      • Test Internet Bandwidth
      • Mic, Projectors for classrooms
      • Fedora Mirror
      • Issue a 'call for routers' - more routers the better to ensure connectivity
      • Test-run of the COD -- registration, QR code, etc.
      • Identify student volunteers and get their numbers.
      • Handy cams for recording
      • Restrooms locations
      • Speakers loungue
      • Place to store speakers food boxes,  100 of them
      • Consult with law enforcement authorities if necessary
      • Check with COEP for putting up stalls for catering
      • Check for FOSS stalls as well
      • Try out Fedora multi-live-usb for transferring live iso to multiple usb sticks - Rahul has details.
  • Videographing
    • Ramki to follow up - updates next week.
  • Infrastructure
    • Power strips -- 10 units, need to buy.
Deadlines, budgets:
http://goo.gl/H91N1
This is a post from http://log.amitshah.net/, licensed CC BY-SA.

Syndicated 2011-10-07 05:16:00 (Updated 2011-10-07 05:17:33) from Amit Shah

30 Sep 2011 (updated 30 Sep 2011 at 12:08 UTC) »

FUDCon Pune F2F Planning Minutes - Sep 27 edition


We started this round with a review of how we're doing with the deadlines we had set ourselves.

We then proceeded to review pending items from last weeks.  Items done are striked out, items needing attention are in bold.

This info is pulled from http://openetherpad.org/fudcon-pune-planning where we take minutes for the meeting.

 Sept-27-2011
 -------------------
 Attendees: Amit Shah, Rahul Sundaram, Kashyap Chamarty, Ramki, Kushal Das, Satya, PJP, Shreyank, Saleem Ansari, Shakthi Kannan
    • Website
      • Content - done
      • aggregation - twitter done; flickr - Sep 30
      • rss feeds - dropped
      • images - done
    • Posters, banners, t-shirts, etc.
      • design - vertical banners still to be done; Sep 30
      • design - tshirt - done
    • Booklet
      • mostly done
      • waiting on welcome letter from Jared Smith - 30 Sep
    • Comm. with participants
      • flights
        • locals - two not booked
        • foreign - 3 out of 9 booked; Harish decided to book others. waiting on passport info.
      • Satya handling all other stuff, well on track.
    • Catering
      • Vendor finalised; other things in progress
    • Swag, media
      • buttons - need to finalise logo

  •  Tshirts
    • highest quality (thick fabric, with collar) (240 GSM) ₹265
    • lower quality (lesser thickness) ₹225
    • lower than that (200-210 GSM, round collar): ₹190
    • lowest (GSM: ): ₹170
    • Decide on the quality and vendor.
    • xtees.in
    • inkfruit.com
    • custom.tshirts.in
    • Kashyap handling this now
  • Swag
    • We need to do the vertical banner design - not done yet
      • Rahul to call Suchakra and confirm progress.
    • Kushal: T-shirt updates: 
      • Talking to more vendors
      • Rates from xtees.in above
    • Lanyard
      • ₹12 per piece from Venus traders
    • Mugs
      • Kushal to get quotes

  • Tickets
    • Rahul, Satya contacting people about visa, tickets, etc. - ongoing

  • Website Info
    • Todo: Milan picture needs to be updated[shreyank/tatica] - done
    • Shreyank / Saleem to reach out to Vaidik Kapoor for other design activities - ongoing
    • Location page needs to be updated.[saleem] - done
    • update flickr javascript widget [Shreyank] - done
    • testing drupal cod. [Shreyank, Saleem, Vaidik] - ongoing
      • Is a set of drupal modules to set up registration, voting, etc.
      • Next meeting will be held in #fedora-meeting; details sent to fedora-websites list


  • Registration 
    • users need to register during FUDcon
    • Printer, power, laptop, papers and volunteers required for registration desk

  • FAD - Shakthi
    • Two FADs now scheduled
    • 1st on 24th Sep at RH office - done
    • 2nd run on 8th of October at COEP
      • Check power sockets
      • Should get a big 15A power points; connection should be from COEP mains
      • Get 3-4 of the 15A ones
      • Get 10-15 smaller ones
      • Test Internet Bandwidth
      • Mic, Projectors for classrooms
      • Fedora Mirror
      • Issue a 'call for routers' - more routers the better to ensure connectivity
      • Test-run of the COD -- registration, QR code, etc.
      • Identify student volunteers and get their numbers.
      • Handy cams for recording
      • Restrooms location
      • Speakers loungue
      • Place to store speakers food boxes,  100 of them
      • Consult with law enforcement authorities if necessary for WiFi access


  • Sponsorships
    • Waiting to hear from potential sponsors
    • Rahul to get more info on Thu, 22 Sep
    • Rahul will talk to GNOME foundation to discuss GNOME Gsoc'ers sponsorship to attend FUDCon.
      • Waiting for a reply
      • Drop this for now

  • Flight tickets booking
    • 2 local(India) contributors have booked tickets so far. Whoever hasn't, please do.
    • Rahul to follow up.
    • Tickets for international travelers need to be updated as additional reminder
    • Rahul talked to Harish and Harish has confirmed that he is booking the tickets for international travelers 

  • Catering
    • PJP to clean up catering page to have only relevant information for the selected vendor.
    • Water -- Confirm with caterers about the water cans/bottles during the event.
    • talk to Murty about water, cold drinks, chips

  • FUPub
    • Moved to Saturday
    • Website upated
    • Cocoon needs to be told - PJP
    • 150 folks is the upper limit

  • Videographing
    • Ramki to follow up - updates next week.

  • Infrastructure
    • Power strips -- 10 units, need to buy.
    • 1 TB Hard-disks -- 2 units -- bought .

  • Rahul to send speaker guidelines to speakers
    • Add this to booklet as well
    • Rahul has written; will put in wiki

Deadlines, budgets:
This is a post from http://log.amitshah.net/, licensed CC BY-SA.

Syndicated 2011-09-30 09:13:00 (Updated 2011-09-30 11:50:17) from Amit Shah

22 Aug 2011 (updated 23 Aug 2011 at 10:10 UTC) »

KVM Forum 2011

This year's KVM Forum, like last year's, was co-located with LinuxCon NA.  Vancouver city played the host this year.

The interest in KVM has been rising over the years; from the first Forum in 2008, when we were just about 30 developers in a single room presenting work done and chatting about directions to take (the virtio design was hashed out during this conference), this year there were about 150 attendees, discussing optimising KVM instances and tracing the guests.  That's a really big leap in three years.

Due to lots and lots of good talk submissions, not all of which could be rejected, the talk slots were reduced to 30 minutes per talk and there were parallel tracks in the afternoon sessions.  This allowed for more talks, but small Q&A sessions, and obviously, having to miss out on some talks due to another talk happening at the same time. All the talks have been video-recorded, though, and they should appear soon on the Forum page.

Some brief notes on the talks I attended:

Avi's keynote started off the Forum. One of the main points was the lack of marketing in KVM, and how the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance to bridge the gap.  He also talked about an ARM port finally getting some development (on his 2008 prediction of an ARM port coming soon not materialising, he said in his 2010 keynote: "this is a case of reality not catching up with predictions").

Paul Mackerras then talked about KVM on the POWER7 processor, another processor to get virt extensions. He talked of replacing pHype with KVM and the challenges to run custom firmware and Linux directly on the machines, as opposed to the default firmware which can only run pHype.

Alex Williamson talked about VFIO-based PCI device assignment.  The current device assignment code makes the kvm.ko module a device driver for the device to be assigned to the guest (I'm to blame for that, I wrote that code). The idea with VFIO is to move the complexity of device assignment into userspace.  VFIO is a device driver which exposes devices in /dev/vfio*, via which the device can be configured and controlled.  This is a much more cleaner and secure way of doing device assignment.

Kevin Wolf talked on the current state of block file formats, and the next-gen block file format.  He criticised the NIH syndrome of people developing new formats in isolation instead of enhancing the current ones.  He's working on collecting the best ideas from QED and FVD, the newest formats, and putting them into QCOW3 while retaining the features from QCOW2, which the other formats dropped.

Stefan Hajnoczi and Paolo Bonzini then talked of a new virtio-scsi transport, Stefan is working on the new in-kernel SCSI target and using vhost to accelerate communication.  Paolo has already written the virtio-scsi spec.

Asias He presented the Native Linux KVM tool. My reaction on the presentation was that they started out as a toy project to run Linux guests, but their planned feature set sounds like they are going to replicate qemu.  That's not a bad thing, though, KVM (the kernel module) was designed to be able to drive multiple userspace hypervisors, and this is the first one that's making some news.

That ended the first day's morning session.  The afternoon session had parallel tracks, I attended the following:

Andrea Arcangeli's talk on the future of Memory Management in KVM had quite a lot of TODO items.  He particularly talked on NUMA management and his ongoing work on it. Current NUMA policies are static; he wants to make them dynamic, with the guest moving to the node where RAM is allocated, and vice-versa.

Rik van Riel then talked about some more MM work: free page hinting, which can improve the memory utilisation both in the host and guest, and automatic memory resizing.  There might be some drawbacks to this as free page hinting may not consider THP and end up breaking huge pages.

Next was "experiences porting KVM to SmartOS", a lively and animated talk by Bryan Cantrill. This talked about porting the kvm module and qemu-kvm to Illumos, a Solaris clone.  They primarily want the benefits of ZFS, DTrace, Zones and KVM. No matter how much interesting it sounds, the question on licensing was addressed vaguely (if at all) during the talk.  In a private chat later, Bryan mentioned there's no violation at all.  There's some talk at lwn.net on licensing as well.

Michael Tsirkin talked on new virtio networking features. Main was the event indexing feature which reduces the exit interrupts to host if there are pending exits and a new buffer is queued in the vring.  Sort of like NAPI for virtio. He also talked about zero-copy TX and filtering, and the security pitfalls of doing so.

Ryan Harper then talked of IO throttling in QEMU, a feature that uses cgroups to ensure guests don't go over their allocated quota of IO activity.

A couple of lightning talks were held, where Dan Magenheimer talked of Transcendent memory, and how that can help with the work that Rik is doing.

A few BOF sessions were lined up, people gathered in groups to discuss.  I caught hold of Hans de Goede, Alon Levy, Anthony Liguori and Gerd Hoffmann to discuss the state of chardevs in QEMU.  Hans had initiated a discussion just prior to the Forum on the non-upstream RHEL and Fedora patches that we carry for chardev flow control.  Anthony mentioned some races in the existing implementation and came up with his own.  He promised to merge the cleanup patchset soon and float the flow control patches to the mailing list.

My other topic, on guest - host communication, got fizzled out, partly due to my jet lag not allowing me to concentrate much, and the other interesting topic, moving qemu away from C.  I used that time to talk with other people.

That ended day 1 of talks. All the attendees then headed out to a pub nearby to exchange stories over beer.

The second day started with Anthony Liguori presenting the keynote on QEMU development. He mentioned how the project has been doing very well with sub-maintainers doing pull requests. A lot of patches have been committed since the last year. Things indeed have improved since the last year, when many people were complaining of patches bit-rotting on the mailing list for ages.

Avi then took stage again to talk of performance monitoring in KVM guests. He talked of providing a Performance Monitoring Unit to the guest via several ways: pass-through, emulating a virtual PMU and emulating a real-life PMU. He also talked of some new PMU features which are not model-specific which can be safely exposed to all guests.

Alex Graf then presented on AHCI.  This was a very cool presentation with nice animation effects (too sad it used non-free software to do that -- I don't know if free software can match those effects, though). He showed how AHCI performed much better than the default IDE storage type.  Performance is half-way between virtio-blk and IDE, but since most OSes support AHCI out of the box (notable exception being Windows XP), he made a case for making AHCI the default.  There is some work to be done before we can do that, though.

Anthony Liguori next talked about QAPI and QOM, the QEMU Object Model.  These refactorings will make QEMU machines much easier to generate, and present a much saner interface to higher-level management tools like libvirt.  The plan is to get as much work done for the impending 1.0 release.  It was refreshing to hear Anthony not talk of replacing code in one big patch (or one big series), and rather work in incremental steps in-tree.  His last year's main point of developing code in separate trees and doing merges had not gone down well with many developers.

Markus Armbruster then talked on qdev, on where we are, what's left, and what are the major pain points.  qdev conversion still remains one of the TODO items from last year, and the more it gets delayed, the more everything else gets delayed in QEMU (including QOM conversion, which could be an incremental step from qdev).

Alon Levy then presented on SPICE, the current status as well as the future. The SPICE protocol is an alternative to VNC with a much better focus on high-latency links and more than just video over network.

Gerd Hoffmann described his work on the USB subsystem. QEMU could go from the last project to support USB 2 to the first one to support USB 3. He also highlighted the work done on bringing down the CPU usage with USB tablet devices to minimal, a common complaint that was heard from users.

That ended the first session; the talks I attended in the parallel tracks were:

KVM Graphics Device Assignment by Allen Kay. We had worked together on PCI device assignment a few years back, and now Allen Kay talked of some roadblocks and ideas in implementing graphics device assignment and experiences from doing so in Xen.

Live block copy in QEMU is being worked on by a few people, Marcelo Tosatti presented the work done so far and the direction in the future. He talked of how the two seemingly independent features of live block copy and snapshot merges can share code.

Joerg Roedel then talked of AMD IOMMU v2 support in KVM: the new feature set makes it possible to not pin all the guest memory pages on the host.  This alone is a very important feature for the future of device assignment.

Next up was Juan Quintela's session on Live Migration.  It was an entertaining ride on the challenges faced and the new directions to take.  One of them was post-copy migration, where the guest memory is faulted over the network after the guest is running on the destination host, since the amount of guest RAM has been increasing over time.

I missed out on the next two sesions, talking to people.

I rejoined for postcopy live migration by Takahiro Hirofuchi. As promising as it may sound, Anthony wanted to ensure we have eked out maximum performance from the current pre-copy implementation and then look at post-copy.  He also asked for benchmarking results for post-copy migration.  An interesting case here may be to guess the working set of a guest, perform a pre-copy using this set of pages, and then switch to post-copy.  The guessing of working set could be done via a guest agent or using MMU notifiers in the host.

That ended a very very long two days of the KVM Forum. We Red Hat folks had a dinner hosted by CTO Brian Stevens, so we headed out to the nearby brewery and enjoyed the fresh lager there.

This is a post from http://log.amitshah.net/, licensed CC BY-SA.

Syndicated 2011-08-22 11:28:00 (Updated 2011-08-23 10:08:36) from Amit Shah

FUDCon India F2F Planning Meeting Minutes (Jul 26 2011)

In this edition of the planning meeting, Suchakra joined us at the Red Hat Pune office.  The others present were Rahul, PJP, Sathya, Shreyank, Saleem, Shakthi and me.

Having Suchakra attend the meeting was great, we made some good progress on the venue-related items that we needed some greater clarity on.

He clarified the bandwidth would be sufficient for our usage, identified a few students as volunteers (we will meet them soon), mentioned setting up a public Fedora mirror would not be difficult at all (bandwidth and storage are amply available).  All this is great news, and he's also going to be around for the next 2 months to co-ordinate with any other venue-related matters.

Logs:

  • FUDCon website
    • Owner: Saleem
    • Most work has been done
    • Needs help from Rahul, Suchakra on content
    • Needs help from Tatica on design
    • Final website will be at: http://fudcon.fedoraproject.org
  • Catering
    • Owner: PJP
    • Got couple of more contacts from Murty
    • Will follow up with them this week
  • Hotel
    • Finalising between two options: Cocoon (within Magarpatta City, very close to Red Hat office) and Royal Orchid in Kalyani Nagar
    • Costs $40 (Cocoon) vs $90 (Royal Orchid)
    • We have a better deal with Cocoon: in addition to a special rate, we are also getting
      • laundry
      • breakfast
      • wi-fi
      • mineral water
      • better rate for FUDPub venue
  • Bus
    • More than one may be required depending on people
  • FUDPub
    • Don't know rates yet
    • Will be decided this week
    • Min. legal drinking age in Maharashtra is 25.  How to filter people?
    • Microbrewery can supply beer at our chosen venue.
      • Deal has to be worked out such that we pay only for what we consume
  • Information on website (plus booklet)
    • Photos
      • Cocoon (accomodation)
      • Magarpatta city
      • FUDPub venue
      • COEP (event venue)
  • Videos
    • Shreyank didn't receive input from Shravan at COEP
    • Rahul to follow up with PyCon people
  • Artwork
    • 3rd week of August deadline for 1st draft of all designs
      • t-shirts, posters, banners, website, etc.
  • Bandwidth
    • PJP hasn't spoken with BSNL people yet
    • Suchakra mentions bandwidth at venue is sufficient (with failover)
      • Recent MITConf served 100 people without glitches
  • Volunteer team
    • Shravan will be heading team
    • Shravan handles routers and infrastructure at COEP
    • Suchakra and Shravan to perform a mock install
    • Saleem and Shravan to run a test install 1 month prior to event
      • Checking router capacity, bandwidth, plug points, etc.
  • Fedora Mirror
    • Owner: Suchakra, Rahul, Saleem
  • Canteen
    • Already open on Fri/Sat. Suchakra will confirm if they can stay open on Sunday
    • Can we host outside caterers at the venue (canteen or outside)? - Suchakra to confirm.
  • Scheduling FADs before FUDCon
    • Owners: Rahul, Shakthi
    • Oct 1st week and Oct end won't clash with exam schedule
    • Suchakra says we can expect about 60 people
    •  Talk to Prof. Abhijit about this -- Suchakra + Rahul
    • These FADs will be prep sessions for the FUDCon
      • Introduce Fedora terminology
      • Introductory / basic material as prelude to talks at FUDCon for the benefit of students
  • Sponsorship requests
    • Rahul officially opened sponsorship window.  Requests pouring in.
    • Deadline of Aug 5, can be extended depending on budget.
    • Review of requests will be done after the deadline
  • Content
    • This now takes 1st priority
    • Rahul to update wiki with hotel info
    • COEP pictures to be uploaded by Suchakra
    • Fill in all details; booklet data can be scraped from website.
  • COEP
    • Organisers to visit venue and meet student volunteers, prof Abhijit sometime in the next 1-2 weeks
    • Figure out which rooms are being allocated to us, check distance between them
    • Power point availability in the auditorium, labs and talk rooms
    • Backup power status
      • Projectors, wifi continue to work in case of power cut?
This is a post from http://log.amitshah.net/, licensed CC BY-SA.

Syndicated 2011-07-27 12:40:00 (Updated 2011-07-27 12:40:47) from Amit Shah

FUDCon India 2011 F2F Meeting 2

The second face-to-face meeting for the FUDCon India planning happened on Tuesday, July 19 at the Red Hat India office.

Shreyank, Saleem, Rahul, Satya, PJP, Kushal, Shakthi and me were present.

Discussion took off from where we were last time and what still needs to be done.  In addition, we now have tentative dates to get feedback on all outstanding items:

  • Confirmation on speakers flying in from outside India (who we are sponsoring)
    • Owner: Rahul
    • Few people have applied for sponsorships, including Kital, Eugene Teo, Buddhika Kurera.
    • We have to get word out to these and others who are considering flying in to book flights ASAP to get better deals.
 
  • Not everyone is blogging about the work they're doing.
    • In addition to keeping everyone apprised of the situation, also helps future FUDCon planners to see what's involved.

  • 1st priority: book hotels.
    • Murty is talking to vendors for deals.  He will have concrete answers by Thursday Jul 21st.
 
  • Visas
    • Items we can give guidance on / items required for obtaining a visa:
      • India gives visa on arrival for nationals of 16 countries.
      • Duration of stay?
      • Who can vouch for the individual?
      • Where will he/she stay?
      • Conference visas and tourist visas might be different for some countries
      • Ppreventive medication may be required.
    • Items we have to assist with:
      • Invitation letter
    • No progress on this till we get flights and hotel bookings sorted out.
 
  • Goodies
    • Owner: Kushal Das
    • Deadline: 31 Aug
    • Talk to Suchakra to co-ordinate posters and vendors.
    • Kushal will get estimates for T-shirts, posters, banners, buttons, stickers, lanyards (tags).
    • Tatica, bckurera working on design of t-shirts
    • Rahul will follow up with designers
 
  • Posters
    • Owner: Suchakra
    • Deadline: 31 Aug
    • Good progress; designs on India list
    • Co-ordinating with design team on logo guidelines and usage
 
  • Booklet
    • Owner: Ankur Sinha
    • Deadline: 31 Aug
    • Not much progress
    • Some details added, but many more needed
    • (Should mention speakers should be able to talk if projector conks off)
    • Rahul to follow up and write content
 
  • Caterers
    • Owner: PJP
    • Deadline: 10 Aug
    • Boxed lunches: INR 350-400 per box
      • Yellow Chillies
      • Makkhan Maarke
    • Buffet INR 75 lesser than that
    • PJP following up with other vendors
 
  • FUDPub
    • Owner: Kushal
    • Deadline: Kushal to have updates next week
 
  • Website + voting
    • Owner: Saleem
    • Deadline: next week (content, funnel, COD)
    • Saleem to set up own server / hosting
    • Kushal to look at funnel
    • Saleem looking at COD
    • Rahul doing content
    • No domain yet from Fedora Infrastructure -- blocker!
 
  • Bandwidth
    • Owner: PJP
    • Deadline: next week
    • PJP to talk to BSNL for a wired line to the venue for about a week
 
  • COEP
    • Owner: Suchakra
    • Infrastructure
      • New routers added, can handle 400 users (40 users per router; 10 available)
    • Set up a mirror on campus -- Rahul + Saleem + Shreyank
    • We need a student volunteer team to interact with - Shreyank to identify
    • One lab running Fedora (dual-boot should also be OK) -- possible?  needed?
    • Canteen
      • Will they remain open on all days?  Serve food for people we're expecting?  -- Saleem
    • Need to identify one room as speaker's lounge
      • Have water/tea/coffee/snacks available
 
  • Backup plans
    • 3G dongles for speakers (if we can't get a dedicated 'net connection)
    • Spare projectors if some go off
 
  • Misc.
    • Registration desk -- identify people who will welcome people and distribute swag
      • Swag distribution can be held off till 2nd day
    • Volunteers necessary to guide people from Mumbai to Pune?
This is a post from http://log.amitshah.net/, licensed CC BY-SA.

Syndicated 2011-07-20 12:24:00 (Updated 2011-07-20 12:24:24) from Amit Shah

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