The annual Flock was held last week in Poland. This year was much busier for me than last year. I’ve been on the team for well over a year now (my how time flies!) so I was more involved with everything.

I gave the annual kernel talk. This was mostly a status report/update. If you’ve been to Flock in the past, this talk will seem very familiar. One item I tried to emphasize this year was that we really wanted to get more people involved. Our policy is still ‘go upstream’ but we still want to build an active Fedora community of kernel participants as well. The distro is probably going to be most users first interaction with the kernel and we want the best experience possible. The slides are super boring but you can read them if you want.

I also did a workshop on building the kernel. This was designed to walk people through building a kernel and applying patches to the kernel. There were a handful of people in the room but everyone was engaged and asked great questions. I learned about dnf builddep for installing requirements and we corrected a problem with the dependencies as well. Overall it was a good use of a workshop slot.

During the Q/A portion of the kernel talk and afterwards, I got a lot of questions about getting started contributing to the kernel. A common theme was “Oh yeah! I always wanted to do kernel things but I don’t know how to get started”. I decided to do a lightning talk about first steps. Getting started in the kernel is an open problem the community is still working on. My suggestions included kernel newbies and the eudyptula challenge. Writing up a longer post on this is on my TODO list.

Apart from times where I was talking, I went to a handful of other talks. I attended several sessions about diversity and community building. I’m happy to see the Fedora community having these conversations and I hope to see more in the future. Peter Robinson gave the usual state of Fedora ARM. The most significant news was the redefintion of primary and secondary architectures. Discussion about this has been happening for a while so it’s good to see this make forward progress to give arm64 a much needed bump.

I did a bunch of hallway track. Still my favorite track. I’m still terrible at putting faces to names but I like meeting people. Thanks to all the Flock organizers who put together a great conference.