MiniDebConf Cambridge Reports

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 25, 2023,
updated Nov 27, 2023

• Andrew Cater: 20231125 MiniDebConf Cambridge day 1 - ARM lecture theatre

  And we're here - a couple of lectures in. Welcome from one Steve, deep internals of ARM from another Steve. A room filling with people - and now a lecture I really need to listen to on a machine I'd like to own.

   As ever, the hallway track is interesting - and you find people who know you from IRC or mailing lists. 

• Andrew Cater: 20231124 - Mini-DebCamp ARM Cambridge day 2

   Another really good day at ARM. Still lots of coffee and good food - supplemented by a cooked breakfast if you were early enough :)
  
  Lots of small groups of people working earnestly in the main lecture theatre and a couple of meeting rooms and the soft seating area: various folk arriving  ready for tomorrow. Video team setting up in the afternoon and running up servers and cabling - all ready for a full schedule tomorrow and Sunday.

Update

More on this event:

• Andrew Cater: Afternoon talks - MiniDebConf ARM Cambridge - Day 1

  A great talk on SteamOS progress to effective boot loaders for atomic OS updates.

  How to produce something that will allow instant updates and instant fallbacks when updating a whole OS image - lots of explanation - and it's good when three or four people who are directly interested in problems and solutions round, for example, Secure Boot are in the room.

  Jessica Clarke on CHERI, Morello and security protections in hardware, software and programming hardware which has verifiable pointers and routines. A couple of flourishes which had the room breaking out in applause.

  Roberto Sanchez and Santiago Rincon on suggestions for LTS and ways forward. The presentation very clearly set out what LTS is, is not, and maybe should be.

• Andrew Cater: Lightning talks - MiniDebConf ARM Cambridge - Day 1

   A quick one slide presentation from Helmut on how to use Debian without sudo - Sudo Apt Purge Sudo

  A presentation on upcoming Ph.D research on Digital Obsolescence - from Eda

  Antarctic and Arctic research from Carlos Pina i Estany 

  * Amazing * what you can get into three well chosen slides.

• Andrew Cater: Laptop with ARM, mobile phone BoF - MiniDebConf Cambridge day 1

   So following Emanuele's talk on a Lenovo X13s, we're now at the Debian on Mobile BoF (Birds of a feather) discussion session from Arnaud Ferraris
  

  Discussion and questions on how best to support many variants of mobile phones: the short answer seems to be "it's still *hard* - too many devices around to add individual tweaks for every phone and manufacturer.

  One thing that may not have been audible in the video soundtrack - lots of laughter in the room prompted as someone's device said, audibly "You are not allowed to do that without unlocking your device"

  Upstream and downstream packages for hardware enablement are also hard: basic support is sometimes easy but that might even include non-support for charging, for example.

  Much discussion around the numbers of kernels and kernel image proliferation there could be. Debian tends to prefer *one* way of doing things with kernels.

  Abstracting hardware is the hardest thing but leads to huge kernels - there's no easy trade-off.
  

Final two:

• Andrew Cater: MiniDebConf Cambridge - 26th November 2023 - Afternoon sessions

  I watched the other lightning talks but then left at 1500 - missing three good talks - to drive home at least partly in daylight.
  
  A great four days - the chance to put some names to faces and to recharge in Debian spaces.
  
  

  Thanks to all involved and especially ...
  

• Andrew Cater: Back at ARM for MiniDebConf day 2 - Morning sessions 26th November 2023

   Quick recap of slides and safety information for the day from Steve McIntyre
  

  Now into the Release Team questions following a release team overview.