»In which we are free, and open-source

It's hard to go wrong at a conference that has a beer menu. And doubly so when the conference is in Belgium, and the beers all local.

Ron Minnich gave a LinuxBIOS talk at FOSDEM. I didn't realise that Google was sponsoring this project: it makes me wonder about the extent of their dependence on BIOS efficiencies. This also makes me realise that the amount of time, energy, and computing cycles conserved on the scale that Google runs almost certainly equates to money.
Another way in which this project saves is through its use in the One Laptop Per Child project, which must needs save money on licencing.

I chuckled at the number of flash-bulbs popping at the beginning of Andrew Morton's talk on Trends in Linux Kernel Development. He discussed coming features and new instrumentation; changes to the core, including a rewrite of the ptrace support code; and approaches to efficient use of hardware. In fact, he addressed virtualisation and containerisation specifically; the first he called a "hack", and pointed at the latter as the proper way to provide separation between tasks. This is an especially intrguing problem for me, as a systems administrator on a distributed system. Providing clean, efficient separation between tasks sharing CPU and memory is a tricky problem; there be dragons. I like the idea of using XenClusters.
Also plenty of Jabber, including a good talk on the direction of libjingle, with outstanding XEPs for session-based features: voice, video, and file transfer. I wanted to listen to more of the gdb and SuSE talks, but so many interesting sessions took place simultaneously ... !