Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] KS Topic Proposal: Vendor and User problems with the Kernel

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 11:21 -0500, James Bottomley wrote: 
> This proposal is a bit different from a concrete topic, but it's based
> on the generally positive feedback from the end user panel last year.
> It's to allocate 2h of Kernel summit to discuss problems raised by
> vendors and end users.  The format I'm proposing is 10 minutes of
> problem introduction by someone from the vendor or user representative
> who is a subject matter expert and 20 minutes of discussion (so,
> hopefully four such problems).
> 
> As usual, the difficulty is actually finding people from the vendor and
> user community willing to do such a presentation (and ensuring they
> won't simply want to talk about their problems with X distro enterprise
> kernels).  The way I think we might get some diverse problems is to send
> out a call for participation.  Something like.
> 
> "The kernel summit programme committe is inviting proposals for
> participation in the 2008 Kernel Summit in Portland Oregon (URL) from
> members of the End User and Vendor communities wishing to raise
> particular issues or problems they see with the current Linux Kernel.  A
> good problem presentation should stimulate discussion with the kernel
> community, and as such the presenter should be a subject matter expert
> capable of engaging in the debate.  While the presenter may have a
> preferred solution, they should concentrate on the problem and be
> prepared to consider the effects of solutions outside of their preferred
> one.  It goes without saying that problems should have a significant
> component which is susceptible to a solution within the Linux Kernel.
> 
> "Proposals of around 500 words and describing the nature of the problem
> and the credentials of the presenter should be forwarded to the Linux
> Kernel Programme Committee at
> <ksummit-2008-pc@lists.linux-foundation.org>"
> 
> Obviously we'd have to circulate this beyond the usual mailing lists,
> but we can solicit help from the Linux Foundation to do this.

Since there wasn't much feedback on this, the programme committee
thought it would be unlikely to produce much in the way of proposals, so
instead, we'll do what we did last year:  recruit two or three end users
to do a lightning type talk followed by 20 minutes or so of discussion.

For those of you who enjoyed the end user presentations last year and
wanted to go into greater depth than we can in a single KS session, the
Linux Foundation is holding an end user summit in October in New York:

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/events/enduser

Since it's already in Manhattan, and a lot of the major banks and other
end users with enterprise class problems are attending, we're going to
try to schedule individual sessions with some of their architects and
kernel developers to go over some of the interesting problem cases.

KS attendees who want to come and whose employers won't pay, we can
likely sponsor (at least some) from the LF community travel fund:

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/travel/

James