[FOSDEM] CFP Valgrind developer room at FOSDEM 2014 (Brussels, Belgium, 2 February)

[Mark Wielaard]

Valgrind developer room at FOSDEM 2014 (Brussels, Belgium, 2 February).

FOSDEM is a free software event that offers open source communities a
place to meet, share ideas and collaborate. It is renowned for being
highly developer-oriented and brings together 5000+ hackers from all
over the world. Taking place in the city of Brussels (Belgium).
http://fosdem.org/

FOSDEM 2014 will take place during the weekend of Saturday, February 1st
and Sunday, February 2nd. On Sunday we will have a devroom for Valgrind.
Devrooms are a place for development teams to meet, discuss, hack and
publicly present the project latest improvements and future directions. 

We will have a whole day to hang out together as Valgrind community.
Please join us whether you are a Valgrind core hacker, Valgrind tool
hacker, Valgrind user, Valgrind packager or hacker on a project that
integrates, extends or complements Valgrind.

Call For Participation

We would like to organize a series of talks/discussions on various
topics relevant to both core hackers, new developers, users, packagers
and cross project functionality. Please do submit a talk proposal before
Sunday December 8th 2013, so we can make a list of activities during the
day.

Some possible topics for talks/discussions are:

- The recently added functional changes (for valgrind users).

- State of the valgrind code base (core hackers).

- Helgrind - basic design, problems and opportunities (core and tools).

- Get feedback on what what kinds of new functionality would
  be useful. Which tools users would like to see and/or which new
  features for the existing tools. (valgrind developers and users).

  - Modify memcheck to report the last leaked pointer to a block
    integrate "omega" as a memcheck option or omega as a separate tool.

  - Better support compiled and JITted code.
    allowing the JIT compiler to indicate the link between
    the JITted code and the source code.

  - Valgrind and transactional memory.

- How to add simple features (adding syscalls for a platform or VEX
  instructions for a architecture port). (new core developers).

- Making Valgrind really multi-threaded, parallelising Memcheck
  parallelising the rest of the framework, and tools (for core hackers).

- Should we continue to support MacOS? What about Valgrind on
  MS-Windows? Solaris? (attracting new hackers).

- Redo the JIT framework to reduce baseline overheads? (core hackers).

- Make Callgrind work sanely on ARM (core hackers).

- Discuss release/bugfixing strategy/policy (core hackers, packagers).

- Packaging valgrind for distros, handling patches, suppressions, etc.
  (packagers).

- Valgrind/GDB integration (cross project).

- Valgrind vs the compiler. Compilers like GCC and clang now have
  "valgrind like" features -fsanitize=address|thread|undefined.
  How does valgrind complement or improve on these features?

- Eclipse and other visualisation tools for valgrind (cross project).

- Practical examples of using Valgrind in (big) systems automatic
  regression testing (users).

Use the FOSDEM 'pentabarf' tool to submit your proposal.
https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM14/

- If necessary, create a Pentabarf account and activate it.

- In the "Person" section, provide First name, Last name
  (in the "General" tab), Email (in the "Contact" tab)
  and Bio ("Abstract" field in the "Description" tab).

- Submit a proposal by clicking on "Create event".

- Important! Select the "Valgrind devroom" track
  (on the "General" tab).

- Provide the title of your talk ("Event title" in the "General" tab).

- Provide a description of the subject of the talk and the
  intended audience (in the "Abstract" field of the "Description" tab)

- Provide a rough outline of the talk or goals of the session (a short
  list of bullet points covering topics that will be discussed) in the
  "Full description" field in the "Description" tab

Julian, Philippe and Mark will review the proposals and organize the
schedule for the day. Please feel free to suggest or discuss any ideas
for the devroom on the Valgrind developer mailinglist before creating a
proposal: valgrind-developers at lists.sourceforge.net

Call For (Video) Volunteers

The FOSDEM organization can provide us with equipment to record some or
all of the talks in our devroom. But we need at least two volunteers to
do the actual recordings. An ideal candidate for this job would be
someone who is going to be watching talks in the Valgrind devroom most
(or all) of the time anyway, and who doesn't mind watching after a
camera and/or an audio mixer while watching the talk.

While some A/V experience is obviously useful for the volunteer, it is
absolutely not required; FOSDEM will provide the right gear and help set
it up, and FOSDEM organizers will also provide enough information so the
volunteers know what to do. This will include a live training session
during the opening talk (in Janson) for those who want it.

If you want to help record talks/discussions in the Valgrind devroom
please let us know before the end of November.

Important dates:

  Video Volunteers:                       Before 30 Nov 2013
  Talk/Discussion Submission deadline:    Sunday  8 Dec 2013
  Devroom Schedule announcement:          Sunday 15 Dec 2013
  Devroom day:                            Sunday  2 Feb 2014

Hope to see you all at FOSDEM 2014 in the Valgrind devroom.
Brussels (Belgium), Sunday 2 February, 2014.
https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/track/valgrind/