Last week was Flock 2018. Highlights:

  • I gave a talk on the relationship between the Fedora and RHEL kernels. The short summary is that that the two kernels are not closely related, despite the fact that they are supposed to be. I’ve been working with some people inside Red Hat to figure out ways to improve this situation. The goal is to have more Red Hat kernel developers participating in Fedora to make the Fedora kernel more beneficial for future RHEL work. I talked about some of the upcoming work such as syncing up core kernel configuration and packaging. This all seemed fairly well received.

  • RHEL + Fedora was a theme throughout many presentations. Josh Boyer and Brendan Conoboy gave a talk about aligning Fedora and RHEL across the entire OS. Some of this was about what you would expect (more testing etc.) but one of the more controversial points was suggesting redefining what makes up the system vs. applications. RPMs are nominally the smallest unit of a distribution but this doesn’t quite mesh with the modern concepts of self-contained applications. You want to be able to update applications independently of the underlying system and vice versa. The talk was fairly high level about what to actually do about this problem but it generated some discussion.

  • Kevin Fenzi gave a talk about rawhide. As a relative newcomer to the project, I enjoyed hearing the history of how rawhide came about and what’s being done to keep it moving forward. I’ll echo the sentiment that rawhide is typically fairly usable, so give it a shot!

  • Dusty Mabe and Benjamin Gilbert gave a talk about Fedora CoreOS. I’ve always thought the CoreOS concept was a great idea and I’m pleased to see it continue on. Some of the talk was a bit of a retrospective about what worked and didn’t work for CoreOS. Certain parts are going to be re-written. I enjoyed hearing the upcoming plans as well as getting to meet the CoreOS team.

  • Peter Robinson ran an IoT BOF. IoT is now an official Fedora objective and has a regular release. Part of the goal of the BoF was to talk about what it currently supports and what people want to do. Several people had great plans for utilizing some older hardware and I look forward to seeing more projects.

  • Peter Robinson and Spot gave a talk on the Raspberry Pi. Support for this device has come a long way and there’s always new things happening. If you have a Raspberry Pi give it a shot!

  • There was a session on Fedora in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Fedora was extremely successful with its interns this past summer and it was great to hear from everyone and the mentors. There is another round of Outreachy happening soon as well.

Once again, a great time. Thanks to the organizers to putting on a fantastic conference.