Days and nights at FOSDEM 2009

Belgian Holiday

Article from Issue 102/2009

Author(s): Nils Magnus , Author(s): Anika Kehrer

More than 5,000 people gathered in Brussels for FOSDEM 2009. Attendees learned to guard their in-demand netbooks, and representatives from major open source projects explained the agendas for upcoming releases.

FOSDEM 2009 organizers recently gathered the European open source developer community to Brussels (Figure 1). Information and notebooks were in such demand that at least two participants reported their devices stolen. Kernel developer and current CTO of the Linux Foundation, Ted Ts'o, was one of the unfortunates.

Ts'o was prepared for the mishap, however, and had a backup notebook with which he demonstrated the advantages of, and road map for, the new ext4 filesystem to the more than 5,000 participants. The new filesystem expands the ext2 and ext3 formats and is still able toread them. Copying an ext3 to a newly installed ext4 allows a faster filesystems check, according to Ts'o. New data structures called extends facilitate the speed increase as they address an array of blocks instead of individual accesses.

Most presentations and workshops were organized largely independently by a mere two dozen projects. Nonetheless, organizers covered a large spectrum of topics, albeit with variable content depth.

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