Re: [LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] FS Maintainers Don't Scale

["Darrick J. Wong" <darrick.wong@oracle.com>]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 10:51:39PM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 07, 2020 at 02:03:33PM -0800, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 09:25:20PM -0800, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> > > It turns out that this system doesn't scale very well either.  Even with
> > > three maintainers sharing access to the git trees,,,
> >
> > I think the LSFMMBPF conference is part of the problem.  With the best of
> > intentions, we have set up a system which serves to keep all but the most
> > dedicated from having a voice at the premier conference for filesystems,
> > memory management, storage (and now networking).  It wasn't intended to
> > be that way, but that's what has happened, and it isn't serving us well
> > as a result.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > This kills me because LSFMM has been such a critically important part of
> > Linux development for over a decade, but I think at this point it is at
> > least not serving us the way we want it to, and may even be doing more
> > harm than good.  I think it needs to change, and more people need to
> > be welcomed to the conference.  Maybe it needs to not be invite-only.
> > Maybe it can stay invite-only, but be twice as large.  Maybe everybody
> > who's coming needs to front $100 to put towards the costs of a larger
> > meeting space with more rooms.
> 
> One of the things that I've trying to suggest for at least the last
> year or two is that we need colocate LSF/MM with a larger conference.
> In my mind, what would be great would be something sort of like
> Plumbers, but in the first half of year.  The general idea would be to
> have two major systems-level conferences about six months apart.
> 
> The LSF/MM conference could still be invite only, much like we have
> had the Maintainer's Summit and the Networking Summit colocated with
> Plumbers in Lisbon in 2019 and Vancouver in 2018.  But it would be
> colocated with other topic specific workshops / summits, and there
> would be space for topics like what you described below:
> 
> > There are 11 people on that list, plus Jason, plus three more than I
> > recommended.  That's 15, just for that one topic.  I think maybe half
> > of those people will get an invite anyway, but adding on an extra 5-10
> > people for (what I think is) a critically important topic at the very
> > nexus of storage, filesystems, memory management, networking and graphics
> > is almost certainly out of bounds for the scale of the current conference.
> 
> After all, this is *precisely* the scaling problem that we had with
> the Kernel Summit.  The LSF/MM summit can really only deal with
> subjects that require high-level coordination between maintainers.
> For more focused topics, we will need a wider set of developers than
> can fit in size constraints of the LSF/MM venue.

<nod>

> This also addresses Darrick's problem, in that most of us can probably
> point to more junior engineers that we would like to help to develop,
> which means they need to meet other Storage, File System, and MM
> developers --- both more senior ones, and other colleagues in the
> community.  Right now, we don't have a venue for this except for
> Plumbers, and it's suffering from bursting at the seams.  If we can
> encourage grow our more junior developers, it will help us delegate
> our work to a larger group of talent.  In other words, it will help us
> scale.

Agreed.  The other downside of Plumbers is that there often isn't a
storage/fs track associated with it, which in the past has made getting
funding for my own participation very difficult.  If I have to choose
between LSFMM and Plumbers, LSF probably wins.

> There are some tradeoffs to doing this; if we are going to combine
> LSF/MM with other workshops and summits into a larger "systems-level"
> conference in the first half of the year, we're not going to be able
> to fit in some of the smaller, "fun" cities, such as Palm Springs, San
> Juan, Park City, etc.
> 
> One of the things that I had suggested for 2020 was to colocate
> LSF/MM/BPF, the Kernel Summit, Maintainer's Summit, and perhaps Linux
> Security Symposium to June, in Austin.  (Why Austin?  Because finding
> kernel hackers who are interested in planning a conference in a hands
> on fashion ala Plumbers is *hard*.  And if we're going to leverage the
> LF Events Staff on short notice, holding something in the same city as
> OSS was the only real option.)  I thought it made a lot of sense last
> year, but a lot of people *hated* Austin, and they didn't want to be
> anywhere near the Product Manager "fluff" talks that unfortunately,
> are in large supply at OSS.   So that idea fell through.
> 
> In any case, this is a problem that has been recently discussed at the
> TAB, but this is not an issue where we can force anybody to do
> anything.  We need to get the stakeholders who plan all of these
> conferences to get together, and figure out something for 2021 or
> maybe 2022 that we can all live with.  It's going to require some
> compromising on all sides, and we all will have different things that
> we consider "must haves" versus "would be nice" as far as conference
> venues are concerned, and as well as dealing with financial
> constraints.
> 
> Assuming I get an invite to LSF/MM (I guess they haven't gone out
> yet?), I'd like to have a chance to chat with anyone who has strong
> opinions on this issue in Palm Springs.  Maybe we could schedule a BOF
> slot to hear from the folks who attend LSF/MM/BPF and learn what
> things we all consider important vis-a-vis the technical conferences
> that we attend?

It seems like Future of LSF Planning has enough interest for its own
BOF, yes.  I'd attend that. :)

--D

> Cheers,
> 
> 							- Ted