[FOSDEM] Call for Proposals: Valgrind developer room, FOSDEM 2015, Brussels, 31 Jan 2015

[Julian Seward]

Valgrind developer room at FOSDEM 2015 (Brussels, Belgium, 31 January).

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

FOSDEM 2015 will take place during the weekend of Saturday, 31 January
and Sunday 1 February 2015.  On Saturday we will have a devroom for
Valgrind.  Devrooms are a place for development teams to meet,
discuss, hack and publicly present the project's latest improvements
and future directions.

We will have a whole day to hang out together as Valgrind community.
Please join us, regardless of 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 by
Monday 1 December 2014, so we can make a list of activities during the
day.

Some possible topics for talks/discussions are:

- Recently added functional changes (for valgrind users).

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

- Speeding up Memcheck by inlining of the fast cases of its helper
  function calls (core hackers).

- Supporting Valgrind on MacOS X 10.9 (Mavericks) and 10.10 (Yosemite)
  (valgrind developers and users).

- The AArch64 ARMv8 port (valgrind developers and users).

- Valgrind and Wine (valgrind developers and users).

- 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, eg -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) system automatic
  regression testing (users).

Use the FOSDEM 'pentabarf' tool to submit your proposal.
https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM15/

- 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

Recording of talks

This year the FOSDEM organisers plan to have live streaming and
recording fully working, both for remote/later viewing of talks, and
so that people can watch streams in the hallways when rooms are full.
This obviously requires speakers to consent to being recorded and
streamed.  If you plan to be a speaker, please understand that by
doing so you implicitly give consent for your talk to be recorded and
streamed.  The recordings will be published under the same licence as
all FOSDEM content (CC-BY).

Important dates:

  Talk/Discussion Submission deadline:    Monday    1 Dec 2014
  Devroom Schedule announcement:          Monday   15 Dec 2014
  Devroom day:                            Saturday 31 Jan 2015

Hope to see you all at FOSDEM 2015 in the Valgrind devroom.
Brussels (Belgium), Saturday 31 January 2015.
https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/track/valgrind/