Kernel Meetup Pune, Report

We had kernel meet-up on 28th Feb 2017 in Red Hat Pune office. This was the second meet-up in the series. It was a very good experience to see people interested in kernel contribution and learning/discussing different subsystems involved. Below is the summary of meet-up:

* Approximately 25 guys attended the meet-up. Overall there was diverse
  crowd comprised of people from different companies/institutes. Some were
  experienced in kernel and related areas, wanted to learn more and contribute.
  Also, good to see few students who were interested in the topic.
  
* First session was: "Submitting first patch upstream" by "jitendra khasdev".
  It was an interactive session with an example of how to submit first patch. 
  Topics covered were git basics, "checkpatch.pl", "get_maintainer.pl", 
  "git send-mail" etc. He also created a test patch after fixing a 
  'trivial style issue' and sent it to staging mailing list. 
* Next we had 10 minutes meet-up/Networking till next session starts.

* After that I presented session on "Overview of Linux Memory Management"
  We started the discussion with the basics of MM and started with topics:
  why we we need 'virtual memory'? How Linux supports it with the help of 
  'paging'? After that we jumped to more intermediate concepts like page-tables,
  TLB, MMU and Memory allocation using kmalloc/vmalloc etc. We also talked 
  little bit about some advanced MM concepts, just to give an overview.
  
  We got good question from attendees... some of them are:
  - Question on 'algorithm of buddy allocator'
  - Zone vs Node relation. how zone manage pages?
  - TLB flush for PTE update? Do we do entire TLB flush or just flush one entry?
  - kmalloc/vmalloc discussion
  - What is high memory?
  - Someone asked about OOM killer and its decision criteria?

* Siddhesh, 'Amit Kucheria' and me(Pankaj) asked attendees to join 
  mailing list for regular discussions and followup. Amit asked people to 
  come up with the ideas on topic of interests for next meet-up.
  - 'Nitin Bansal' agreed to present session on kernel debugging using crash.
  - 'Jitendra will give "session on ext filesystem in general"

This is all the talk we had in the meet-up. I really enjoyed attending it 
and enthusiasm of attendees was awesome. Looking forward to more meetups 
in future and sessions to learn and share knowledge.

Thank you