Kernel hacking, Software Suspend (Suspend2) and other coolness

Posted on April 06, 2006

Lots of interesting stuff in yesterday's sessions. Did the full day kernel hacking tutorial with Rusty Russell and Robert Love which despite the disorganisation and the fact that we ran out of time was a great intro and a lot of fun. Although they might not realise it, Rusty and Robert have a good dynamic that stops things from getting boring.

The open source quiz was great to watch. Some fairly crazy madness.

I hung around until late for some of the Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions. The most interesting for me was the Software Suspend "installfest". This stuff is seriously cool. Fully featured suspend to hard disk with no special hardware/power management support required. You really don't ever need to shutdown your Linux system again. I was lucky enough to have all the Suspend2 developers helping me get it working on my notebook. It was suprisingly easy. I'm planning on contributing a cleaner kernel Fedora RPM with the Suspend2 patches. The guys are pushing to get this into the mainline kernel soon which should make this a lot more accessible.

At around 10pm we were kicked out by the organisers and some of us headed down to the Wig and Pen (again!). Drank too much (again!) and chatted to lots of cool people. Finally managed to track down Colin Charles who Seth Vidal told me to look out for at the conference. I should really easy up on the drinking one of these days...