Minutes

BLUG MEET - 30th January 2004

The meet was held at the usual place, Shanthala Hall at Hotel Ashraya International on Infantry Road. The theme for this meet was Kernel 2.6. Not many people turned up for the meet considering that it was a kernel topic and only kernel enthusiasts would turn up. 52 people turned up for the meet which is low as per our BLUG standards. People started trickling into the hall at 6 pm and the meet kicked off at 6:30 pm

Kartik, the BLUG Co-ordinator, began proceedings with a welcome note and he also mentioned that this was the first regular meet since September 2003. There were no meets apparently during Oct-Nov 2003.

The first talk was presented by Mahendra from Infosys. As if he needed an introduction! Mahendra's talk focused specifically on process scheduling in Kernel 2.6. Well, I am not much of a kernel hacker myself. So please pardon me if some of the notes that you find in this minutes regarding Kernel 2.6 doesn't make sense.

Mahendra's talk was very interesting and lively. A lot of discussions were entertained during the talk which led to a healthy debate. Devdas Bhagat fed a lot of inputs towards process scheduler in Kernel 2.6 during the talk. Mahendra did an excellent job towards making the talk lively by requesting inputs from the audience with their experiences on Kernel 2.6. Mahendra also demonstrated migrating a process from one CPU to another by using the migration function of kernel 2.6. Mahendra's talk invited a good number of questions from the audience about priority level for processes, interactivity in kernel scheduling, separate schedulers for separate I/O devices and so on. The talk ended with a discussion started by Devdas about kernel scheduling in database servers running huge I/O operations. Mahendra finished his talk which was very good overall judging from the questions asked and he suddenly disappeared from the venue. Kartik informed me later that he had to rush to office to take care of a few things. Long trip from Infantry Road to Electronics City I guess.

The second talk of the evening was presented by R Karthick from Infosys. Karthick's talk was about memory management and RMAP in Kernel 2.6. BTW, Karthick has also submitted some patches to Kernel 2.6. Way to go Karthick ! Way to go ! Karthick kicked off his talk by using a diagram to explain the benefits of using memory management and the concept of memory hierarchy. Karthick's talk explained the intricacies involved in page tables, virtual to physical mapping. He explained about page table entry using status bits. A good and lively discussion was also ensued during the talk about NRU, LRU and other aspects of memory management and RMAP or reverse mapping in Kernel 2.6. Some members of the audience started blinking when Karthick started talking about zone balancing. So he had to explain what it was. Karthick then mentioned about how to use kswapd function for zone balancing. The last slide acknowledged the various references for the talk and Karthick was finished with his talk. Karthick's talk was very technical and interesting as well.

The Meet ended with all the participants in the meet involving in having some snacks and socializing. I also got a chance to share my experiences that I had with the various LUGs in Australia and also to catch up with what I missed in the BLUG from Aug-Dec 2003. We also had a member from the Chennai LUG during this meet and a few BLUG first timers as well.

That is all for this meet folks, the first meet of 2004. See you all at the next meet !

Cheers,

Surjo

FINAL ACCOUNTS
SourceIncomeExpensesBalance
Covercharges (52x100)5200
Hotel Charges5200
Final Accounts520052000
All amounts are in INR