Josef “Jeff” Sipek

I woke up at about 10. Took a shower, packed up and checked out. Just as last year, I decided to take my camera and wonder around Ottawa taking photos of interesting looking things. Well, the center of Ottawa is small. By about 14:00, I was kind of bored. So I decided to go back to the hotel and waste some more time. In front of the hotel, I noticed the shuttle to the airport. I asked the guy how frequently he was going, but he misunderstood me and told me how long it takes to get to the airport instead. He then asked if I was going. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I told him that I’d just grab my bags.

We got to the airport at 14:36. So it took 15 minutes to get there from the hotel. Not bad. Then, I however realized that there wasn’t much to do at the airport. I sat down on one of the benches. Not even 10 minutes later, Movement poped up out of nowhere. We chatted about how exciting flying is. His flight back to .uk was with a layover in Atlanta - not fun. Around 15:10 he left because he was about to check in. I decided that the terminal couldn’t be any more boring, so I checked in as well. During the chat, I decided to take a photo of him. This year that’s the only OLS photo of a person! All the other photos are of Ottawa. I’ll put it up in few days, when I dig it up.

Good thing I checked in :) When I got the the terminal, I sat down near the first outlet I saw. I was about half way though the boot sequence when I notice about 7 other OLS attendees not far from me. They included Mike Halcrow, Val Henson, and some other people some of which seemed familiar, but who’s names I did not know. We chatted. Mike actually showed me a leak in the FiST templates as well as Unionfs. We chatted, until most of them left because their plane was ready. I and some other dude moved to another cluster of chairs with some more OLS attendees which appeared as we were chatting. There we had an interesting discussion about Australian politics. Some really odd things happen there. :) Some time later, they all headed to their plane (yeah, my flight was at 18:00, and I got to the airport at 14:36…). Few clusters of chairs away, I noticed Dave Jones. I decided to walk up, and ask him if he thinks there were enough changes to the bug tracking issue he was talking about in his keynote last year. He thinks that there were some, but most of them were minor. He was really hoping someone would make some automatic bug-report moving tool which automatically moved kernel bugs from say the Red Hat bugzilla to the kernel.org bugzilla.

Then they called my flight. It was the same type of a plane as on my way to Ottawa - made by Bombardier - a small jet. The flight itself was uneventful and everything went well and on time. One thing that I found interesting was the fact that the US customs people are in Ottawa and not in New York.

When I got home, I just fell asleep. :)

The day began with an awesome presentation I gave about Unionfs. :) Shawn was recoding it, but after the presentation, he found out that the video turned out to be crap. He has audio only. I’m sure he’ll share it soon. :) I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people that use Unionfs or were interested in Unionfs.

The keynote was excelent as always. However I must say that Greg K-H made it sound like any piece of code will get into the kernel. Yeah, right :) But he did say few nice things about the status of Linux.

After the keynote, there was the GPG key signing - which I did not attend, although I wanted to. Instead we went to get some food. Food was good, we (I, Dave, Mike Halcrow, and Prof. Zadok) talked about a bunch of things ranging from MythTV and terabyte storage servers, to things like the number of ants in Texas. (Apparently, it is a lot of fun to watch termites and fire ants battle to the death. O_o )

We finished food around 19:45 which was about right to head over to the Black Thorn for the after event party. Just as last year it was quite interesting. Pretty much as soon as I got there, I noticed Peter Baudis aka. pasky - the cogito maintainer. We chatted about how git and Mercurial differ (Matt’s talk the day before came in handy :) ). I mentioned I was slowly working on a generic benchmark script that would test a number of popular SCMs including Mercurial, Subversion, and CVS. He was thrilled about the prospect of knowing exactly where git sucked compared to other SCMs - my guess is that he wants to fix it and make it better, a noble goal, but unnecessary as Mercurial already exists and why reinvent the wheel? ;) Seriously, though, I think a lot of people would benefit from knowing exactly where each SCM excels, and where each sucks. The nice thing about collaborating with the git people would be that it would make it more apparent that this wouldn’t just be yet-another-fake-test. After some time, a bunch of other Czech people poped up right next to us (people like, Pavel Machek, etc.). It was quite interesting. :)

After than I joined a converation with some Intel people. As it turns out, one of the Intel people is working on the e1000 driver — awesome piece of hardware, by the way, don’t ever buy anything other than it. :) Some time later, Jens Axboe joined the group briefly. When he said my name seemed familiar, I mentioned how I tried to implement IO priorities - and failed :) Later on, a guy from University of Toronto joined the group. He approached me earlier in the day about unionfs on clusters. We chatted about things ranging from school (undergraduate program, and grad school) to submitting kernel code to lkml. The e1000 guy said a similar thing that we should split unionfs up into a few patches, and send it off. During the event a few people still asked me about Unionfs, which felt good :)

Then, I decided that it would be fun to talk to some IRC people. I found John Levon and Seth Arnold. We sat down, and had an interesting conversation about a number of things. Since at least some of these were quite interesting, here’s a list:

1. How can I deal with VFS and not drink vodka or other hard liquer
2. Everybody hates CDE, even people at Sun
3. Solaris is dead (well, they didn’t say it, but that’s the feeling I got)
4. Brittons have some interesting sports or at least some of the expected behavior during the sport is interesting, namely:

1. darts - you are expected to drink as you play
2. I can’t recall the name - gigantic pool table
3. cricket - everyone smokes "reefer" (to quote Movement, I just find this name of the substance mildly amusing) because their games sometimes take several days

After that, they kicked everyone out as it was 2:45 already. We (Seth, John, and I) went back to the hotel. There, Prof. Zadok and Chip (who arrived on Friday) were about to get up and head to the airport. :) I just went to bed.

Friday was kind of interesting. The talks were little weaker, but there were some interesting ones. For example, Matt Mackall’s Towards a Better SCM: Revlog and Mercurial talk was a nice way to learn how Mercurial stores the history. I got tired so I went back to the hotel, and fell asleep for few hours. I woke up just in time to head over to the conference center for the 20:00 Stackable file systems BOF. That was interesting. A lot of useful people showed up, including Christoph Hellwig, Ted Tso, Val Henson, Steve French (Samba/CIFS guy), Jan Blunck,Eric Van Hensbergen (plan9 fs implementation in Linux) and many more. Topics included limited stackspace (4K on i386), cache consistency, locking, and nameidata structure brain damage.

As we planed before, after the BOF we invited everyone over to the hotel for some snacks and drinks. That’s where things got really interesting. I spent a lot of time with Jan Blunck and Eric Van Hensbergen talking about the proper way to do unions. Three people, three different ways to union files :)

After that we had some fun with the stack space issue and Reiserfs (and Hans’s approach to open source).

stack space

There should be a competition "who can create the largest storage stack without overflowing the stack." For example, unionfs on top of gzipfs on top of versionfs on top of device mapper on top of md on top of scsi over ethernet on top of ppp tunneled thought ssh …. you get the idea

Reiserfs

Apparently, Christoph once fixed something trivial in reiserfs code, he sent the patch to Hans, and in return he got a gigantic legal document (I know exactly what he is talking about as I have submitted a patch once as well). Well, he didn’t like it, so he gave Hans a bunch of options one of which included certain sum of money for copyright to the code. Interestingly enough, Hans accepted. Too bad I didn’t know about this story before, I might have made some money of off my one line fix to the reiserfs section in the Kconfig file. :)

I have to say, I really want to look at how plan9 works thanks to the conversation I had with Eric Van Hensbergen. It seems to have a lot of really good ideas. Hrm, now that I think about it, I might install it one of my old boxes. Yeah, I know I am odd.

So, today was interesting. Some of the people I saw and/or talked with included: Andrew Morton, Alan Cox, Dave Jones, Jim Gettys, Matt Mackall, and so many others I don’t even remember.

When I got back to the hotel, I noticed this one interesting sign on it (on the inside), I couldn’t resist to take a photo of it. Here’s a cropped portion of it that has the amusing part (there was presumably the same text in French as well as a map to the nearest emergency exit):

So, the conference started today, with Jonathan Corbet’s presentation about the changes in the past year. I showed up about a minute before he started, and therefore many of the seats were taken. I, however, did not try to look for a seat. Why? Simple. I noticed someone who seemed familiar. When the presentation ended, I walked to him and said: “You know, you look just like this one Finnish guy that maintains this program that a bunch of my friends use.” Then we had a nice conversation for the next half hour about things ranging from who he wants to be the VFS maintainer, why certain symbols are not being exported, etc. About half way though, Mike Halcrow (of the eCryptfs fame) showed up, and joined our conversation. He said two things that made Linus (yes, it was Linus Torvalds) cringe:

1. He suggested to add a way for some of the vfs calls to be “filtered” - he however used the word “streams” to describe this flow of data; Linus’s reaction was “you said the bad word”
2. Then there was brief segue into security - he mentioned BSD security levels, to which Linus replied with “We still support that crap?!”

Of course there were plenty of other people that I saw, including Andrew Morton, S. Tweedie, Ted Tso, and the list can go on and on.

So, the first day here in Ottawa is about to end. I didn’t do all that much simply because I was tired - I actually fell asleep for few hours, which helped a lot as I had only about 4.5 hours of sleep before heading to the airport. In the afternoon, I found Rik van Riel and Matt Domsch. We chatted a bit. Anyway, I’m going to get some food.

Almost a year after returning from his quest, brave Sir Jeff decided that ’tis was time to return to the land of Canada. And so the quest began once again.

So, with little over 12 hours before my flight takes off, I am starting to pack and all the other related things - Yay! This year, I’m going to OLS not as an attendee, but also as a speaker. As you may have guessed, the topic is Unionfs. See you in Ottawa!

So, yeah. I finally forced myself to write one of these blog entries. Woohoo! I’ve been quite busy for the past two weeks (doing some cluster building, and then slideshow making - I leave for OLS in only 4 days!) I must say it should be interesting - the presentation, the impromptu stackable filesystems BOF.

I just found this very bizarre image (mirror) (too wide to include it here) which explains rather humorously  RAID.

Oh yeah, I should have probably posted this earlier…the OLS paper is done. And it looks good :)