The new year has only just begun, and already our first conference of 2022 is on the horizon. Join us down under this week for the virtual edition of linux.conf.au, as we discuss bringing WebM Alpha support to GStreamer, and provide a status update on the futex2 syscall!

Proudly sponsored by Collabora, linux.conf.au 2022 is "the largest linux and open source conference in the Asia-Pacific region. The conference provides deeply technical presentations from industry leaders and experts on a wide array of subjects relating to open source projects, data and open government and community engagement".

Just like last year's edition, LCA2022 will be once again be held entirely online, with four Miniconfs kicking things off this Friday, January 14, followed by a busy two day main conference on January 15 & 16. Among the 80+ sessions spread out over three days will be two from Collabora's André Almeida and Nicolas Dufresne, as well as a talk on KernelCI by Gentoo's Alice Ferrazzi. Here's a look at what each will be discussing.

LCA2022 session details

• State of futex2 – Friday, Jan. 14, 10:40 AEDT.
  Presented by André Almeida.
  
  The current futex syscall poses some limitations for modern workloads. To solve these issues, long term research has been carried out on creating futex2, a new interface to overcome the issues faced by the previous iteration. This research included talking with userspace developers and proposing some implementations. Following the futex2 update presented at LCA last year, this talk will look at the current status of the futex2 syscall, the different approaches taken thus far, and some use cases.
  
  
• Bringing WebM Alpha support to GStreamer - Saturday, Jan. 15, 10:45 AEDT
  Presented by Nicolas Dufresne.
  
  Surveys of children from age 6 to 17 years old are showing a majority want to become either a professional vlogger, or YouTuber. These new generations, beginning with millennials, are consuming video content like never before. To make video editing and production easier, transitions with transparency capability have become very common. These transitions have their own marketplaces. They are mostly encoded using the royalty-free CODECs VP8 and VP9, and are stored into a WebM (Matroska for Web) container. Unfortunately, these CODEC implementations do not support the alpha plane that provides transparency.
  
  In this talk, Nicolas will introduce the audience to retro alpha support, a workaround specification designed by the Google WebM team to enable VP8 & VP9 to support transparency, and will dive into the architecture he has implemented in GStreamer to support this type of video, both with software decoders and hardware-accelerated V4L2 decoders.
  
  
• Merging an existing framework into KernelCI - Friday, Jan. 14, 15:40 AEDT
  Presented by Alice Ferrazzi, Gentoo
  
  KernelCI is a project focused on testing the upstream Linux Kernel on different hardware with an open testing philosophy and high modularity. Thanks to this approach, KernelCI is expanding its testing ecosystem by allowing new tests and trees to be easily integrated into KernelCI.
  
  We will talk about two main systems of growing the current KernelCI ecosystem:
  - Adding to the KernelCI code
  - Using KCIDB (KernelCI’s common reporting system)
  
  From a CIP project (Civil Infrastructure Platform) testing member and KernelCI CIP instance mentor, you will get an overview of the effort of the CIP project to merge its current testing system into KernelCI, and how it is possible to collaborate and send test results to KernelCI using KernelCI’s common reporting system KCIDB.

Join us!

If you plan on attending linux.conf.au 2022, please come say hello after our talks, or meet us in one of the many chat rooms. See you there!

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