During last weekend on October 07 - 08, 2023. I was attending Ubuntu Asia x Libre Office Asia Conference. This is the first post pandemic F/OSS conference on Asia level held in Indonesia. The venue for this event was FKIP UNS Solo.

This event was a blast and become a reunion for most of the community members after the pandemic separates us physically. Members from Korea, Japan, Malaysia, India, and also Timor Leste came and speak together for the event.

For myself, i have begun to attend F/OSS conference since 2015. This was when i still on Universitas Indonesia.Faculty of Computer Science alongside several of my friends on currently defunct Kambing UI helped to organize Gnome Asia 2015. After that, i have attended Open Suse Asia 2017 on Japan, and Open Suse Asia 2018 in Taiwan.

Sure, became a core system administrator from one of the largest (now defunct) national F/OSS software repository has its own merit and priviledge :D. I was kidding, you can all submit your job and contribution in enhancing F/OSS and building the community. By building these community knowledge together, we are emporing and further expanding the engineering and opportunity for F/OSS development into general public.

There are some interesting highlight during these conf.

First, we got eBPF talk by Aldin. Yep, in these recent years eBPF become the most celebrated and interesting topics to be discussed. You can do anything from manipulating data path inside kernel by using eBPF. From simple observability, network acceleration, security, into device driver development. I also played with eBPF, even currently not for production wide. Aldin create some demo on to do Load Balancing over eBPF.

Second, we got Ubuntu Touch Phone deployment. A nice effort to resurrect your old Android hardware into sidekick workstation or plaything device.

Utian Ayuba also covered some topics on F/OSS security aspects and their misconceptions.

We also got the youngest speaker in this conference, 15 years old teenager. This junior high school student talks on his hardships on developing and teaching rural area students about digital art and vector graphics using f/oss tools such as Inkscape.

Steamdeck and GNU/Linux Gaming Evolution

On Open Suse Asia (2017 - 2018), i talked about on how Universitas Indonesia build our Single Sign On stack by elevating F/OSS. This time, i talked about popular topics - gaming in GNU/Linux -.

My talk explore the evolution on gaming and low level system related project. These project currently become building blocks for high performance system and gaming. The culmination currently are Gaming Console that based on GNU/Linux start to become not so rare item on the market. Steam Deck from Valve is one of the current culmination. Valve involvement in GNU/Linux gaming has brought a wonderful colour to the community.

Some projects that i discussed during my talk, such as :

• Insensitive Case with Unicode support in Linux File System
• Improvement in Memory Management
• Syscall User Dispatch, to map non native / alien system call into Linux native system call
• Improvement in TCP Congestion Control
• Kernel that specially tuned for interactive desktop and gaming performance
• eBPF involvement in gaming device driver development via USB HID eBPF

The class was quite full, so i welcoming there to join the dark rabbit hole in exploring many low level wonders on Linux Kernel.

For those who interested, this is the presentation for my talk.

Sponsorship

One of the advantage on joining F/OSS conference is sponsorship. Every speaker are given a sum of reimbursement for their transportation and lodging. So you not need to worry much about your travel cost.