Debian Conference 2014

Speakers:
Work on your project, conduct your ad-hoc meetings and enjoy DebConf.

Speaker: Jonathan Wiltshire
We aim to establish a 'nice' protocol for negotiating package salvaging, without the negative connotations of hijacking. This is the continuation, and hopefully conclusion, of a discussion in Nicaragua last Debconf. It's a meeting for a few teams, not a public talk or BoF.

Speaker: Yutaka Niibe
In this casual session, I will demonstrate Gnuk Token, which is built by Free Software and free hardware design. I will demonstrate NeuG standalone device, which can generate random numbers at 70KiB/s, too. My PGP/GPG key is RSA 2048-bit now. I understand that some person doesn't want to sign my key, because it looks weaker. I develop Gnuk, the firmware for USB Token, which is compatible to OpenPGP card, under GPLv3. My original purpose/goal was not to put a person into a dilemma: computing freedom vs. better security. I think that I have achieved the goal somehow, and it's strong enough (RSA 2048-bit) and it's not that slow (1.4sec to sign), IMO. It is unfortunate for me that Debian community demands RSA 4096-bit or more. Thus, another dilemma is still there; longer key length or better control of private key by Free Software. Good news is that I have implemented Ed25519 (for signing) already, and going to implement Curve25519 (for decryption) in Gnuk. Besides, I am also GnuPG developer, and try to implement Curve25519 support now. It will be good if GnuPG 2.1 will be released and people will enjoy Gnuk Token with Ed25519/Curve25519 until Debconf15 in Germany. During the development of Gnuk, I develop NeuG, the true random number generator to generate private keys on the device. The entropy source is built-in A/D converter. I realized that this feature is very useful, and I build standalone device (just for generating random numbers). FST-01 is a reference board for Gnuk/NeuG. It has STM32F103 as MCU which runs at 72MHz. It has no crypto accelerator. Schematic design and PCB design are available as free hardware design. Material is available at gobby.debian.org: debconf14 -> bof -> gnuk

Speaker: Kees Cook
Discuss all things AppArmor in relation to using and packaging it in Debian.

Speakers:
Work on your project, conduct your ad-hoc meetings and enjoy DebConf.

Speaker: Joey Hess
This session is about filling out a wiki page and defining a process, not making any kind of controversial decision.

Speaker: Eric Dantan Rzewnicki
A meeting of Summit developers for DC14 and those interested in working on it for future DebConf editions. Main topics for discussion: 1) Upstream coordination, 2) Requirements collection for post-dc14, 3) Integrating www.debconf.org into django

Speaker: Michael Banck
Discuss the possibility for companies to continously contribute to Debian/DebConf via a yearly participatory fee, and what this means for DebConf fundraising and sponsoring

Speaker: Roopa Prabhu
This talk introduces ifupdown2, a new network interface manager for Debian. ifupdown2 is a rewrite of ifupdown. It maintains backward compatibility with ifupdown. ifupdown2 is used on Cumulus Linux, a Debian based distribution for network switches. Existing tools for network interface configuration have several shortcomings when applied to network switches. These challenges include the lack of ability to handle interface dependencies, incremental updates to interface configuration without disruption, interface configuration validation and simplifying interface configuration in large scale deployments. The lack of such functionality increases operational burden. ifupdown2 attempts to solve these challenges through an implementation based on dependency graphs, querying running state before applying interface configuration, extensions to ifquery to support validation of interface configuration, templates for large scale cookie-cutter interface configurations, JSON support and more. ifupdown2 on github: https://github.com/CumulusNetworks/ifupdown2 ifupdown2 documentation on github: http://cumulusnetworks.github.io/ifupdown2/

Speaker: Neil Williams
Planning and brain-storming for how to validate Debian. Which parts of Debian need (more) validation? How is that validation going to work? What new software is needed or what changes are needed to existing software to get this running? Who is going to do the work?

Speaker: Colin Watson
Work out what we need to do next to move forward UEFI Secure Boot support in Debian.

Speaker: Lucas Nussbaum
Discussion of the State of the Union^HProject

Speaker: Antonio Terceiro
The Debian Continuous Integration project, powered by the debci package, aims at constantly running tests against packages uploaded to Debian. In this talk I will present the origins and current state of the project, how it works and how to add test suites for your packages. There will be also a discussion of best practices for as-installed test suites for Debian packages.

Speaker: Peter De Schrijver
In this presentation we will start from basic CMOS power consumption factors. We will use that as the basis to explain the various possibilities to balance power versus performance. We will then continue explaining how these techniques are implemented both in the SoC hardware and in the the operating system and application software. Android, maemo, OMAP and Tegra will be used to illustrate the techniques. We will start by explaining which factors influence power consumption in CMOS chips. We will then explain a number of commonly used techniques to control the power versus performance balance such as clock and powergating, clock and supply voltage scaling and heterogenous multiprocessing. We will continue explaining how these techniques are implemented in linux using various frameworks such as cpuidle, cpufreq, common clock framework, runtime PM, generic powerdomains, device QoS constraints, system suspend. We will then discuss how application code affects the device power consumption and discuss how Android and Maemo handle this. We will also discuss various debugging mechanisms and tools such as powertop, ftrace and other information in linux sysfs and debugfs. We will also explain hardware techniques we have used to gain insight in the system operation beyond the view of software. I gave this talk at fosdem already, but if there's interest from people who haven't seen it, I can give it again.

Speaker: Josh Triplett
Let's look at a future Debian system, taking full advantage of systemd components and features. This presentation will take an entirely different approach from past discussions of systemd in Debian. Rather than thinking about how to avoid or replace individual components, we'll look at how they fit together, and what unique functionality they provide. Finally, after exploring this world of the future, we'll return to the present and discuss ways to enable smooth transitions. We'll also explore facilities in systemd that support easier and better integrated selection of components, both for system services and within user sessions. Technologies covered include journald, systemd-networkd, socket activation, timer units, containers, and systemd user sessions. Goals include reducing boot time, reducing duplicate configuration, improving system manageability, improving battery life, and unifying graphical session startup.

Speaker: Joachim Breitner
Packaging Haskell for Debian entails some unique challenges. There are many Haskell packages, but only few maintainers. The Haskell packages are quite homogenous (good), but they have complex dependency requirements (bad?) and a very unstable ABI (bad). This meeting will introduce the tools and processes we have in place to cope with this complexity, including a short live demonstration of some packaging work. After that, we will discuss some of our open issues (and welcome input from outsiders!).

Speaker: Dimitri Ledkov
ABI-compliance-checker (acc) is a tool that can be used to catch unintentional abi breakage, as well as to assert ABI stability of a release and validate 3rd party binaries to be compatible with a given release. A debhelper plugin dh_acc is also available, but the adoption has been very slow. A short presentation on what dh_acc is and how one can leverage it will be presented. Presentation will be followed by discussion on how to lower adoption barrier and/or provide abi compliance on a more holistic approach (e.g. do we want an archive-wide service for Debian similar to http://upstream-tracker.org/ ?) Type: BoF, presentation, discussion Tracks: QA, Validation & CI, Packaging and tools

Speaker: Ben Hutchings
The Linux kernel is under rapid development. Stable releases are made around 5 times per year, each including many new features and support for new hardware. This talk will summarise the features that have been added and enabled in the last year. There have been many changes to Linux between 3.10 and 3.16. Some of these will require new or updated userland applications to take advantage of them. I will attempt to summarise the most interesting changes and the state of integration in Debian.

Speaker: Neil Williams
This talk looks at how to extend the existing automated validation architecture recently added to Debian beyond the scope of Linux on ARM to include distribution kernel images, package combinations and installer images.

Speakers: Tassia Camoes, Moray Allan, Martín Ferrari
DebConf organisation working group