Hi everyone,
I attended the Embedded Linux Conference earlier this month and have now returned home from the extended trip, so it seems like a good time to share my experience.
The event was a combination of ELC with the OpenIoTSummit, so it was huge with 800 participants and nine parallel tracks. Often enough there were multiple interesting topics at the same time, and as usual the "hallway track" -- meeting people in person to discuss further topics is the most important one.
Slides for most talks have now become available at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/embedded-linux-conference and videos were promised to get posted soonish. Some personal highlights include:
* Porting Linux to a new archicture by Joël Porquet http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/elc-2016.pdf I've talked about this topic before myself at previous conferences, and his talk was particularly well structured and easy to follow, covering all the important parts. Probably not what most of you need for your work though.
* Lessons from Ion by Laura Abbott http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/elc16.pdf Memory management for GPUs remains an interesting topic, and Laura gave an excellent retrospective of what happened with Google's Ion approach, what went wrong, and what problems remain to be solved. Unfortunately only about 10 people were in the room, as it was the very last session and it conflicted with Grant Likely's popular talk about "Hardware Design for Linux Engineers".
* Understanding a real-time system by Steven Rostedt http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/elc-understandin... Stephen's talks are always worth attending, even when there is little actual new information in them. See the video if you have anything to do with realtime systems
* OpenBMC by Tian Fang http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/OpenBMC_2016ELC.... Facebook are doing one of two projects to bring a proper open source and secure OS into the baseboard management controller. This is incredibly important work, and I'd recommend reading the LWN article about the talk at https://lwn.net/Articles/682944/. One outcome was that this article has triggered the other OpenBMC team (at IBM) to speed up working on their kernel patches to get support for the popular AST2xxx SoC family mainlined, we should see patches soon. Note that this is the same BMC that is used to manage most ARM servers, and it normally runs a closed-down ARM9 or ARM11 Linux distro itself.
I initially planned to attend without giving a talk myself because I could not think of a good topic, but Mark Brown had the idea that I could talk about my side project of fixing build warnings, and that worked out great in the end. There is even an LWN article about it at http://lwn.net/Articles/683476/ (for non-subscribers: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/683476/180f1aedcd1d0b5b/ ) and my slides are at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/Static%20code%20... The room was almost full, and the topic was well received (though I still think my two presentations last year were much better).
I was talking at the same time as Mark Rutland and Karen Sandler, and I probably want to see both of their presentations once they become available for streaming.
Arnd