KS2010: Future summits

The 2010 Kernel Summit was the tenth annual gathering of kernel developers. Your editor, who has attended all ten, is amazed at how time flies. During that time, Summit organizer Ted Ts'o said, the event has used the same organization and has stayed about the same size. Meanwhile, over those ten years, the kernel development community has grown considerably. In 2000, it was possible to invite all of the significant contributors; now it's not even remotely possible. That leads to "strange and arbitrary choices" in the invitation process and, perhaps, important people being absent for many discussions.

Do we think that is a problem? If so, perhaps it is time to change the format and expand the attendance at the summit. It could, conceivably, be turned into a multi-track conference open to all, perhaps with a closed component.

Christoph Hellwig asked if the Summit is necessary at all. According to him, the "hallway session" is the most important part of the event; half of the talks had been useless.

Ted went on to say that, given the attendance limitations of the current summit format, discussions of low-level technical issues is nearly impossible. There is just no way to have all of the right people in the room. That has led to the proliferation of subsystem-specific minisummits where the real technical work is done. Instead, at the main kernel summit, "we are all managers." As an alternative, the summit could be changed into a series of colocated minisummits with some plenary events and a one-day closed session.

Things will be moving in that direction. Next year's summit will be held in Prague, Czech Republic, in October. It will not be a completely open event, but some moves will be made toward the creation of a more inclusive kernel summit. There will be some (probably three) minisummits which will be colocated with the Prague event, which will be expanded to three days. Which minisummits will be there has not yet been determined.

It looks to be an endurance event for some, though: there will be a three-day kernel summit, an open weekend, then the first LinuxCon Europe event, followed by the Embedded Linux Conference Europe. Your editor is interested to see how it works out.

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