Budapest and the Ubuntu Developer Summit

Last week I was at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest.
The best news is: the next release of Ubuntu, oneiric ocelot, will have dom0-capable kernels in main and Xen (4.1, very likely) hypervisor/tools in universe. The plan is to have the hypervisor and tools in main in the next LTS. This is a great step forward.
I’d just like to say a big thank you to all those of you who’ve worked so hard (and had your patience so sorely tested!) getting Xen dom0 support into Linux upstream. Now we are really starting to reap the rewards.
“Cloud” topics were quite prominent in the agenda generally. Both
OpenStack and Eucalyptus were well represented, and there’s exciting new stuff in the field of “cloud orchestration” (eg Ensemble). We need to do some background work to make a readily buildable set of Xapi packages for OpenStack at least, as OpenStack’s Xen integration is via Xapi.
Of course as a longstanding Ubuntu and Debian developer, I attended various other sessions where I was able to help out, and I met a lot of old and new friends. Also outside of the formal programme, there was a lot of interest in Xen.
Perhaps the highlight of the conference’s social programme for me was the Invisible Exhibition fringe event: at this exhibition, which is entirely in the dark, we wandered through a series of scenes which we explored by touch. One aim of the exhibition is to help understand the experience of blind and visually impaired people.
On the personal side: I had nearly two weekends in Budapest, which is an excellent and exciting city; I recommend it. I was particularly impressed by the Children’s Railway and Memento Park.