A month ago, I was in Nürnberg, attending the X.org Developer Conference (XDC2012) as a Nouveau developer.
The location
This year, the XDC was sponsored by Suse and held at their headquarters located at Nürnberg, Germany.
The Booksprint
Two days before the conference was the booksprint that I took part in. There were 5 of us, Bart Massey, Alan Coopersmith, Matt Dew, Lucas Stach and myself. We improved the two books that are currently being written but none of them is actually done yet. The latest version of Stéphane Marcheusin’s book is available on git. The other book is to be finalized and will be released in a near future.
One highlight of the booksprint was the visit of the Open Invention Network who visited Bart to talk about defensive patents.
The XDC2012 Program
The program of this conference along with the attendees list is hosted on the x.org wiki. This year’s XDC was pretty much diverse and had no particular topic as can be seen on the program. I personnally took part in 3 talks:
- Return of experience on the EVoC : How to better prepare the Students
- Recap, Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Discussions on the graphic Stack’s Security
- DRM2 : Let’s Fix the DRM Authentication Policy and Buffer Sharing
The first talk was about my experience as an X.org Endless Vacation of Code mentor during summer 2012. The second was shared with Timothée Ravier and we talked about the security of the graphics stack. This talk sparked some interest and has been the subject for a LWN article. It also initiated discussions with Kristian Høgsberg and Daniel Vetter that actually ended up as another talk, my third one. I am very pleased by the reaction of the community towards what I have been considering as one of the biggest issue towards providing a secured desktop computer.
Social events
We spent most of our spare time hanging out with other X.org devs. As usual, it has been a very pleasant experience. The fact that food and drinks were good and cheap actually encouraged us to stay outside longer than we probably should but it all ended perfectly well for everyone :)
Die Nürnberg AltStadtFest
I’m sure you are familiar with Munich’s Oktoberfest (AKA BeerFest). Well, Munich isn’t the only city in the area to have such kind of event. In Nürnberg, it is called the AltStadtFest (literally “Old City Festival”). It started before we arrived and after we left but here are some few pictures from the event.
Saturday’s Beerhike
The saturday after the conference, X.org hackers had the opportunity to go beer hicking! The concept was to walk in the outskirt of Nürnberg, from biergarten to biergarten.
I would like to thank the Luc, Matthias and Egbert for this lovely day!
Sunday’s trip in Nürnberg’s recent History
Surprisingly, only a handful of us actually managed to be ready for another round of visits. This time, we went to visit Nazi’s anual rally area that lasted until the end of the WWII. This place, called Nazi party rally grounds was indeed full of history and demonstrated the megalomania of their leader.
Without further ado, here are some pictures. Make sure to read the captions!
FOSDEM 2013?
This conference is now over. This was my third XDC conference and I have had one hell of a time!
See you at FOSDEM 2013, in Brussel!