This conference only has a single track, so I attended almost all the talks. This time I didn't take notes but I've summarised all the talks I attended. This is the second and last part of that; see part 1 if you missed it.

XDP closer integration with network stack

Speaker: Jesper Dangaard Brouer

Details and slides: https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2019/xdp-closer-integration-with-network-stack/

Video: Youtube

The speaker introduced XDP and how it can improve network performance.

The Linux network stack is extremely flexible and configurable, but this comes at some performance cost. The kernel has to generate a lot of metadata about every packet and check many different control hooks while handling it.

The eXpress Data Path (XDP) was introduced a few years ago to provide a standard API for doing some receive packet handling earlier, in a driver or in hardware (where possible). XDP rules can drop unwanted packets, forward them, pass them directly to user-space, or allow them to continue through the network stack as normal.

He went on to talk about how recent and proposed future extensions to XDP allow re-using parts of the standard network stack selectively.

This talk was supposed to be meant for kernel developers in general, but I don't think it would be understandable without some prior knowledge of the Linux network stack.

Faster IO through io_uring

Speaker: Jens Axboe

Details and slides: https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2019/talks/faster-io-through-io_uring/

Video: Youtube. (This is part way through the talk, but the earlier part is missing audio.)

The normal APIs for file I/O, such as read() and write(), are blocking, i.e. they make the calling thread sleep until I/O is complete. There is a separate kernel API and library for asynchronous I/O (AIO), but it is very restricted; in particular it only supports direct (uncached) I/O. It also requires two system calls per operation, whereas blocking I/O only requires one.

Recently the io_uring API was introduced as an entirely new API for asynchronous I/O. It uses ring buffers, similar to hardware DMA rings, to communicate operations and completion status between user-space and the kernel, which is far more efficient. It also removes most of the restrictions of the current AIO API.

The speaker went into the details of this API and showed performance comparisons.

The Next Steps toward Software Freedom for Linux

Speaker: Bradley Kuhn

Details: https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2019/talks/the-next-steps-toward-software-freedom-for-linux/

Slides: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/talks/Kernel-Recipes-2019/kernel-recipes.html

Video: Youtube

The speaker talked about the importance of the GNU GPL to the development of Linux, in particular the ability of individual developers to get complete source code and to modify it to their local needs.

He described how, for a large proportion of devices running Linux, the complete source for the kernel is not made available, even though this is required by the GPL. So there is a need for GPL enforcement—demanding full sources from distributors of Linux and other works covered by GPL, and if necessary suing to obtain them. This is one of the activities of his employer, Software Freedom Conservancy, and has been carried out by others, particularly Harald Welte.

In one notable case, the Linksys WRT54G, the release of source after a lawsuit led to the creation of the OpenWRT project. This is still going many years later and supports a wide range of networking devices. He proposed that the Conservancy's enforcement activity should, in the short term, concentrate on a particular class of device where there would likely be interest in creating a similar project.

Suricata and XDP

Speaker: Eric Leblond

Details and slides: https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2019/talks/suricata-and-xdp/

Video: Youtube

The speaker described briefly how an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) interfaces to a network, and why it's important to be able to receive and inspect all relevant packets.

He then described how the Suricata IDS uses eXpress Data Path (XDP, explained in an earlier talk) to filter and direct packets, improving its ability to handle very high packet rates.

CVEs are dead, long live the CVE!

Speaker: Greg Kroah-Hartman

Details and slides: https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2019/talks/cves-are-dead-long-live-the-cve/

Video: Youtube

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Identifiers (CVE IDs) are a standard, compact way to refer to specific software and hardware security flaws.

The speaker explained problems with the way CVE IDs are currently assigned and described, including assignments for bugs that don't impact security, lack of assignment for many bugs that do, incorrect severity scores, and missing information about the changes required to fix the issue. (My work on CIP's kernel CVE tracker addresses some of these problems.)

The average time between assignment of a CVE ID and a fix being published is apparently negative for the kernel, because most such IDs are being assigned retrospectively.

He proposed to replace CVE IDs with "change IDs" (i.e. abbreviated git commit hashes) identifying bug fixes.

Driving the industry toward upstream first

Speaker: Enric Balletbo i Serra

Details snd slides: https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2019/talks/driving-the-industry-toward-upstream-first/

Video: Youtube

The speaker talked about how the Chrome OS developers have tried to reduce the difference between the kernels running on Chromebooks, and the upstream kernel versions they are based on. This has succeeded to the point that it is possible to run a current mainline kernel on at least some Chromebooks (which he demonstrated).

Formal modeling made easy

Speaker: Daniel Bristot de Oliveira

Details and slides: https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2019/talks/formal-modeling-made-easy/

Video: Youtube

The speaker explained how formal modelling of (parts of) the kernel could be valuable. A formal model will describe how some part of the kernel works, in a way that can be analysed and proven to have certain properties. It is also necessary to verify that the model actually matches the kernel's implementation.

He explained the methodology he used for modelling the real-time scheduler provided by the PREEMPT_RT patch set. The model used a number of finite state machines (automata), with conditions on state transitions that could refer to other state machines. He added (I think) tracepoints for all state transitions in the actual code and a kernel module that verified that at each such transition the model's conditions were met.

In the process of this he found a number of bugs in the scheduler.

Kernel documentation: past, present, and future

Speaker: Jonathan Corbet

Details and slides: https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2019/kernel-documentation-past-present-and-future/

Video: Youtube

The speaker is the maintainer of the Linux kernel's in-tree documentation. He spoke about how the documentation has been reorganised and reformatted in the past few years, and what work is still to be done.

GNU poke, an extensible editor for structured binary data

Speaker: Jose E Marchesi

Details and slides: https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2019/talks/gnu-poke-an-extensible-editor-for-structured-binary-data/

Video: Youtube

The speaker introduced and demonstrated his project, the "poke" binary editor, which he thinks is approaching a first release. It has a fairly powerful and expressive language which is used for both interactive commands and scripts. Type definitions are somewhat C-like, but poke adds constraints, offset/size types with units, and types of arbitrary bit width.

The expected usage seems to be that you write a script ("pickle") that defines the structure of a binary file format, use poke interactively or through another script to map the structures onto a specific file, and then read or edit specific fields in the file.