Andrew Tridgell

Flying with Linux

1:20 pm Friday 16 January 2015

Andrew is a Linux addict who has become obsessed with autopilots. When not coding he is testing (and sometimes crashing!) search and rescue aircraft in an attempt to bring affordable search and rescue UAVs to the world.

For more information on Andrew and his presentation, see here.

Daniel Vetter

Botching up IOCTLs

3:40 pm Friday 16 January 2015

Daniel Vetter started to contribute to the linux kernel a few years ago when the graphics stack rewrite broke his old laptop and all the developers were busy fixing newer machines. From then on it went all downhill and since 2011 he's enjoying the fun and frustration of working on the Linux graphics driver stack professionally at Intel's OTC. Since 2012 he is also the kernel maintainer of the Intel graphics driver.

As the i915 maintainter Daniel managed to get the quality issues under control and the driver off the infamous No. 1 spot on the kernel's regression list - where it beat entire subsystems. He established solid testing procedures, created an entire new testsuite for the kernel and enforced strict requirements for merging patches.

Additionally Daniel spent a lot of time improvimg the drm (direct rendering manager) subsystem. Daniel was a major driver behind the effort to write documentation for all driver interfaces. He removed lots of old cruft and separated the new-world modesetting driver from the horror show of the legacy drivers and reducing the rather hapzardous ioctl interface surface for drivers.

For more information on Daniel and his presentation, see here.

You can follow him as @danvet and don’t forget to mention #lca2015.

Zane Gilmore

FLOSSing in the lab – What Plant and Food Research does with FLOSS

3:40pm Thursday 15th January 2015

Zane is a developer and computer consultant for scientists working for the Plant and Food Research Institute. He writes software (mostly in Python) and advises scientists on how to facilitate their science. He has worked as a developer since 2000 after he got a degree in Computer Science at University of Canterbury.

For more information on Zane and his presentation, see here.