Kernel Recipes, the Linux kernel conference in France
Walid: hello and welcome to Projets Libres, the podcast of LinuxFr.org that talks about free software, open data and digital commons. I’m Walid Nouh and today we continue on the momentum of the previous episode, we’re going to continue talking about conferences.
This time, we’re going to talk about a conference that has been around for 13 years called Kernel Recipes. And I have with me Anne Nicolas, who is the organizer of Kernel Recipes and who will explain everything we need to know about this conference. Anne, listen, I’m delighted. Welcome to the Free Projects podcast, nice to have you talk about this conference.
Anne : Thank you for inviting me.
Presentation of Anne Nicolas
Walid: This conference is partly a result of discussions we had when we crossed paths in the corridors of FOSDEM. So I’m also delighted that we can talk about it a little longer. Well listen, to start with, as in all episodes, I’m going to let you have the floor and I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself, that you tell the listeners of the podcast who are you Anne? What is your background? Where do you come from?
Anne : Well, my name is Anne Nicolas. I have a slightly atypical background, maybe like many in the free software industry, I don’t know. In fact, basically, I’m an economist, so I’m not in the field of computer science at all. And I started my professional career in that. And very, very quickly, in fact, I got a little annoyed.
I looked for what I really wanted to do, and at the time, it was in the early 2000s, I found a webmaster training. And it just so happened that in this training, there was, I think, 15 days of discovery of Unix and Linux before attacking the job of webmaster. And in fact, I was passionate about it. And I said to myself, this is what I want to do.
I continued, I finished the training and then I went on this theme. After that, it was a rather positive sequence of things because free software being a very open field, I was able to meet a lot of people, to train myself.
I also started with Léa Linux. I first consulted a lot of the documentation and then I wrote a lot of it. I joined the Léa Linux team. I was one of the 4 or 5 who managed the site. It allowed me to discover this universe which is very special, which is very enriching, and to give conferences, etc.
Then, I had to live well, and I found a job in a small company that did open source support. And it just so happened that this small company was bought by Mandriva, MandrakeSoft at the time. And that’s how I joined MandrakeSoft, where I spent a little over nine years. First in support, and then, it had been tickling me for a very long time, I moved to the distribution side, to do packaging, and in particular integration, to manage part of the team and releases, and then, also part of community management.
So, all this happened pretty well, rather very quickly. And then, since then, I have effectively stayed in the open source world. And today, I work in a small company where I am self-employed. I am working on the integration of open source bases with tools too, so a lot of training, consulting, etc.
Walid: And you stayed in the Mandriva environment after leaving Mandriva, since you worked on Mageia, right?
Anne : yes, so indeed, one of my contributions to free software. The Mandriva project was much more than a job, for most of the employees who were in this company. And we could see the company going downhill, we didn’t want the project to stop there at all. So, we decided to do a fork.
So, it was maybe a little unconscious at the beginning, because it’s a huge thing. In two or three months, we managed to lay the foundations. We called the distribution Mageia. It’s a distribution that still exists. I spent, I don’t know if it’s eight or nine years on distribution, on Mageia, being most of the time chairman. So, it’s a block that is very, very heavy, that takes a lot of time. So today, I don’t have too much time anymore, so I follow the distribution from afar. But yes, it was an extremely enriching contribution.
Walid: Very good. And so, to finish, you were just saying that currently, you have your own company, right?
Anne: yes, so actually, so Mandriva, it didn’t end very, very well. Everyone knows that. I was part of the company, one of the subsidiaries that had been placed in judicial liquidation. And so, following that, we had set up a first company with several employees, well former employees of Mandriva, which was called hupstream. And it’s with this company that we started Kernel Recipes. And today, in fact, I work on my own because I find it to my advantage. And then to manage the family, it’s true that it’s easier for me.
Walid: Ok, very good. And what kind of subject do you work on?
Anne : So at the moment, I’m working a lot, a lot on all the tools that are related to development, like Git, everything that is CI/CD, GitLab. Deployment tools too, for example, I’m working a lot on Ansible. And then always on the Linux base, industrialization, packaging, because these are requests that are indeed still there.
Kernel Recipes Overview
Walid: Listen, I suggest you open for Kernel Recipes, to introduce the conference. What is Kernel Recipes? What is its purpose, first of all?
Anne : Well, Kernel Recipes, as its name suggests, is first and foremost a conference focused on the Linux kernel. And why Recipes? Because it’s a conference that we want to be quite practical, that is to say to exchange tips, whether it’s development, contribution, community management, etc.
It allows the project’s contributors to meet each other, but also the users of the core, whether for individual objectives or for companies, for that matter. All this little world mixes a little. It remains at the technical level only. That is to say that there is no impact behind commercial, etc. It’s really technical discussions.
Walid: ok. So, kernel, Recipes, we could translate that as kernel recipes…
Anne : That’s right, exactly. And since we’re in France, it didn’t seem bad to us, you know:)
Walid: And yes and okay so it’s the people who come it’s technical people yes it’s people who come from far away it’s more people who come from Europe it’s rather well there are people who come from everywhere
Anne : The first edition was Franco-French, that is to say that it was only in French and there were only French people and the conference took very strong, well it developed very, very strongly and today there are people who come from all over the world.
In terms of speakers and participants, we still have people who actually come from the US, but also from all over Europe.
Walid: Okay. We’ll come back to that later on a little bit about the ambitions of the conference and everything. And this year, this year, it’s being held in Paris. Has it always been held in Paris?
Anne : Yes, it has always been held in Paris. So first of all for practical reasons, because in fact, we are very small in terms of organization. We do it as closely as possible, with what we know. And then because, quite simply, it’s central to bringing in the speakers, the participants,
Walid: That year was in September. Was it always more or less the same or did the dates change, vary from year to year?
[Editor’s note: The conference takes place from 21 to 23 September]
Anne: So yes, because we realized that the conference calendar is extremely busy. When we look, for example, on LWN, when we look at the calendar, the conferences always fall on more or less the same dates every year. So, we decided to do the same.
It just so happened that at the end of September, it was actually a kind of niche between Plumbers [Linux Plumbers Conference], which is another conference for kernel developers, and then some Linux Foundation conferences. We found a small slot here. The only year where it wasn’t the case was just after COVID, when we wanted to do an edition quickly. We’ll talk about it again, it was interrupted. We did it in June of that year, but it was the only time.
Walid: Can we give in a few words, before going into more detail, what is the role of this conference in relation to the core ecosystem? Does it have a special place? Does it have something special compared to other conferences like the one you just mentioned, for example?
Anne : So, a role, I don’t know, we didn’t really give ourselves a role at the beginning, except to exchange in nice, somewhat informal conditions, because that’s really what we also put at the center, it’s the informal side of the conference.
If I compare the main conferences to which we could compare, the ones that talk about the kernel, in any case, there is Plumbers, which is the big conference of kernel contributors, quite formal in its organization, and there are the Linux Foundation conferences, which always have slots dedicated to the kernel. There is FOSDEM, which for some time now has also had a room dedicated to the kernel, which was not the case at the beginning, when we organized Kernel Recipes.
That’s about it in things that are very focused on the core. How do we position ourselves in relation to that? It’s more about size, that is to say that we deliberately remain small. We have a maximum of 130 participants, precisely to keep this dimension of exchange, to facilitate exchanges.
Unlike all these conferences that exist, we have a single track, that is to say only one conference at a time. We don’t have several rooms, we only have one. The idea is really that everyone attends all the conferences on the agenda.
At first, we thought it was a little risky. And then we got feedback, even from core contributors who told us “In the end, it’s not bad because, for example, I don’t care about anything related to graphics cards. The operation of the graphics server is not my thing. But here, it seemed super interesting to me and I got information that I wouldn’t have gone looking for if I hadn’t been forced to stay in the room somewhere.”
We had several feedbacks in this direction which means that we have continued in this mode.
Walid: It’s really a big differentiator compared to other conferences because when you go to big conferences like FOSDEM or other you have 15 conferences at the same time, you always have the frustration of not being able to see the conference you wanted because there is another one and you are forced to make choices. On top of that, the rooms can be full and so in the end you can lose a bit.
Anne: Yes, and you always feel like you’re not in the right room. And then, in the end, the one you attend, in the end, it doesn’t correspond to what you were hoping for, etc. There’s always this frustration, indeed. And that’s something we didn’t want to reproduce with this smaller dimension and this unique track. And in fact, this differentiator, I think it works well.
Walid: Among the other things that I noticed or that I was told about, there is the fact that I find very interesting, which is that there is no call for conferences, you choose the speakers. Can you say a few words about it? Was it like that from the beginning?
Anne: I’ve been part of conference organizing committees, including Solutions Linux [Editor’s note: now OSXP]. I’ve also seen the calls for applications, I’ve also participated, etc. What bothers me a little about the call for applications is very good, but it’s that we always have the same people who show up. We still have “somewhat professional” speakers, whose job is to give conferences.
And besides that, there are people we never hear from and who have extremely interesting things to say. We said to ourselves that if we want to avoid this way of operating, indeed, we are not going to make a call for applications.
So, the first few years we would look for the speakers ourselves and we would make the entire agenda according to the news of the moment, the topics that were a little hot, etc. And then afterwards, it worked by word of mouth, that is to say that there was a speaker who contacted us the following year and he said “Hey, I saw this guy, it might not be bad if we had him at the conference, there are things to tell, etc.”
And then, for the past 4-5 years, we’ve had what we call a sponsor. We thought it was interesting to highlight someone who has a special place in the community. So, we had Steven Rostedt, and this year it’s Jonathan Corbet from LWN.
The sponsor, his job, if I may say so, is to help us organize the agenda, to help us find his speakers. So he does a big part of the work, even if we bring them too, because we go looking for them too, for example at FOSDEM typically. And all that, in fact, in the end, gives this agenda that we present every year.
Walid: Is it a long job to find speakers and do you manage to achieve a form of parity?
Anne: Parity is something extremely complicated. First of all, on free software, at least in development, as soon as we come across very technical parts, we have fewer women, that’s for sure… very few women.
So the Linux kernel is even worse. So last year, we had a lot of them, because indeed, we had someone who worked on programs related to parity in learning development on the Linux kernel. That helped us a lot. This year, it will be less the case. We try every year, but it’s quite complicated.
Walid: Is it hard to find speakers? Is it a big job?
Anne: No, in general, we have too many people. That is to say, the more things go on, the more we progress, and indeed, the more word-of-mouth has worked, people are quite surprised, even in the first few years.
People said yes to us very quickly, very quickly. And what helped us a lot was that after four years, we had a guy named Greg K-H come to speak at the conference. He was so excited about the conference that at the end, he said to me “listen, if you need speakers, you tell me, I’ll send an email and put you in touch with the people in question”. So with an entrance card like that, it was hard to do better.
Walid: Can you just remind you who Greg K-H is?
Anne: So, yes, Greg K-H, Greg Kroah-Hartman, I’m afraid I’m going to scratch his name. It’s number 2, if I may say so, of the Linux kernel. On the one hand, we have Linus Torvalds who is responsible, somewhere, for the development, the development versions of the kernel.
On the other side, we have Greg who takes care of the stable versions. And he’s the one who oversees, in fact, all the stable versions that are coming out today. So, who has a preponderant place today in the core.
Walid: ok. Among the other specificities, I had also noted several things already in terms of price, because the conference is not very expensive, if you want to say a few words.
Anne : Yes. It was even free at the beginning, because you have to know that at the beginning, the first two rooms we had were the Cité des sciences in La Villette, at the digital crossroads, and then it had become too small, we went to Mozilla, like many conferences at the time.
In any case, at Mozilla, what was imposed on us was free admission. We had the premises, but we had to be free of charge. It suited us very well, because what we wanted from the start was to have something hyper-accessible.
So apart from FOSDEM, which is a little bit of a special case, there are a lot of conferences that are expensive, for example, typically, conferences at the Linux Foundation are extremely expensive and very, very not accessible, except when, indeed, you manage to get paid for a seat, for example, by the company.
So that was something that was very close to our hearts. And then afterwards, we were forced to change the room, since Mozilla moved. Today, we are at Cité Universitaire. It’s an extremely nice environment. But here, we were forced, indeed, to start charging admission because indeed, the costs are not at all the same. But always trying to remain extremely reasonable on the entrance fee.
Walid: And how much is the entrance fee?
Anne: So, this year, for example, it’s 50 euros excluding taxes, so 60 euros with taxes per day.
Walid: It’s very, very reasonable. I’ve been told about another specificity, which is the flying microphone. Can you explain? Because I don’t really know, but please explain it to me. I was told it was nice.
Anne: It’s the Fly-In Mic. When we talk about Fly-In Mic, it’s part of the traditions of Kernel Recipes. In fact, it’s something we stole from Mozilla.
There was that in the room at Mozilla. So it’s a microphone that’s wrapped in a kind of polystyrene. And then, on top of it, we have a foam packaging with logos, etc. And rather than crossing into the room to pass the microphone during the Q, we send the microphone. And so, when we started on Kernel Recipes, people were immediately on board.
It’s quite fun. There are some funny things that happen sometimes, the microphone that goes in the head, etc. But it contributes to the conviviality of the exchanges. And I know that there are a few confs that have actually taken up this principle afterwards.
Walid: Are there any other specificities or things that you would like to highlight?
Anne: Almost the first [editions], we’ve had a rather peculiar character in the room called Frank Tizzoni who, to tell you the truth, is my brother-in-law.
He works in graphic design, and he has the little particularity of being a caricaturist. And so, his job is to sketch the participants and the speakers in quite nice things. We make the drawings available. So, the speakers all leave with their drawings.
Which, a little anecdote, is often the thing that identifies the conference is: “I saw Steven Rostedt present the conference to someone and say ‘Come and speak, you know, it’s the conference where you leave with your drawing.’ And then, it was super great, etc.
We see a lot of them on the net in terms of small images, etc. And so, that’s really a marker. And today, it would be difficult to do without it. In fact, it’s really become the thing that identifies the conf.
Another thing that has also been close to our hearts for a few years is what we call “charity auctions”, that is to say that we organize a session in relation to a project, which, at some point, will be highlighted. It’s a charity project: so it can be help with computerization. This year, for example, it’s the Software Freedom Conservancy. And it already allows us to highlight the foundation. So, in general, we have a representative who comes to present the project, discuss, etc., the news.
And then we auction off a whole bunch of things, precisely, for the benefit of this association or foundation. And that’s a pretty nice moment too.
Walid: Wait, please give me an example of a whole bunch of stuff. I don’t really see. What are you putting up for auction?
Anne: So, you’ll see that it’s very varied. For example, at home, we make beer. So every year, we actually bring bottles of beer with the label signed by all the speakers. It’s the pretty classic thing.
We also had companies that donated to us. For example, last year, it was a Formula 1 car made of Lego. So that’s a hit.
We have a friend who is a professional embroiderer in Paris and who has made caps.
The little thing completely different: we have parties with everyone, and one day we had a paper placemat, all dirty with grease stains and everything. We asked the speakers to sign this thing. And it went for 200 euros.
That’s to say that that’s really the idea behind it, it’s really to put forward this project, to come and bring help as small as it is, but that’s it, it’s quite nice.
The Kernel Recipes Story
Walid: I suggest you go back a little now and go back to 2012, when Kernel Recipes was created to understand your motivations. What was the environment like in 2012, what makes you say to yourself “Ah, it would be nice to do this conference”?
Anne: I’m going to disappoint you a little, we didn’t have any plans at the beginning. Actually…
Walid: wait, first of all, “we” had no plan.
Anne: There aren’t many of us in the organization of the conference and we don’t have any particular objective. We didn’t say to ourselves one day, “hey, we’re going to do a conference, we’re going to talk about the core and we’re going to do it like this”.
It started completely randomly: we organized a barbecue at home. And it fell at the moment when, I don’t know if you remember, the kernel.org server was compromised, and all the GPG keys had to be reapproved.
And it turns out that Erwan, my dear and sweetheart, did the job for a certain Willy Tarreau, who is a contributor and maintainer of the stable kernel.
Willy Tarreau is someone we were told: “you’ll see, he’s antisocial, he never wants to go out, he doesn’t see anyone, etc”. And in fact, we got along so well that he came to the house, we had a barbecue with other people who were more or less working on the core. And then, while we were talking, we said to each other, ” Hey, it’s cool, we’re exchanging here, we’re exchanging. Couldn’t we do that with others? Because there’s nothing happening in France “.
And in fact, it all started from there. At the time, I was working in the company hupstream, so it was the post-Mandriva and I thought that maybe this is also my way of contributing to open source, of organizing this conference and giving time, of promoting these exchanges and of providing a space, a place, etc., with particular themes.
It started like this: we’ve been visiting conferences for a very long time, so we knew we didn’t want to do something too big, because we talked about FOSDEM, we wanted something different. Very quickly we thought that there would only be one conference at a time.
In the end, it was set up very, very quickly, so at the beginning in a completely artisanal way. We said to ourselves that we were going to test French participants at La Villette, as I was telling you earlier, all in French.
Note from Anne and Erwan: it’s hard to talk about Kernel Recipes without talking about Willy Tarreau. Without him, we probably wouldn’t have done it. A long-time kernel maintainer and creator of HAProxy, he didn’t just put his name on the project: he opened his network, which made it possible to bring in maintainers beyond the reach of a young Parisian conference. For the past 12 years he has been providing us with support and continues to bring us speakers, such as Paul McKenney.
And there was an English speaker who was there that day. It was only one day. It was David Woodhouse, who specializes in storage management and who works at Amazon today. The poor guy did the whole conference in French. He did his in English, of course. And we said to ourselves, if we want to have people who talk about a little more varied backgrounds, we’re going to have to switch to English.
So the second edition went in English, and we went over two days because we had been asked. And at the end of the second edition, we were asked to move to three days. And now, we have today’s format. So it started a bit by chance, if I may say so.
Walid: From what I understand, you were mainly inspired by the other conferences for what you didn’t want to do. And so afterwards, you found your way as you went along?
Anne: That’s right, exactly. Yes, absolutely.
Walid: What makes these first editions work and the conference starts to gain fame?
Anne: We were lucky to have, from the start of the first edition, topics that were rather very interesting, even if we only had French speakers, etc. And the topics were very popular.
People said to themselves, well, it’s a conference that is super interesting. And I remember the first edition, there was no one who opened their laptop in the room. And often, in a conference, you see people who are a little distracted, who are doing something else, etc. And there, we had people who were rather very hooked. So, we said to ourselves, maybe we have the right thing, the right way of operating. So, we’re going to continue. But we were the first to be surprised, I must say.
Walid: Have you had sponsors or sponsors, people who have helped you and who have also made it work?
Anne: On the speaker’s side, indeed, Greg Kroah-Hartman, who helped us a lot because, quite simply, by his position on the kernel, and who was also very promising. And then, we had people like Steven Rostedt, who is very enthusiastic about the conference and who, one day, took me to the Linux Foundation event that took place in Lyon 3-4 years ago. He took me around the conference and introduced me to people. I had a hard time following, I was grading, grading, grading and I even met Linus Torvalds. We’re trying to get him to come but it’s complicated because basically he doesn’t do many conferences anymore.
We have Jens Axboe, who is very, very active both in terms of speaker and sponsorship. We thank him.
Walid : What does he do?
Anne : Jens Axboe, he’s working on IO_uring, a project that makes it possible to gain in efficiency on the use of disks, on the management of I/O. So it’s something that has exploded too.
We also had David Miller who is the maintainer of the whole kernel network stack. There were some emotions too, because David Miller had a stroke a few years ago. He then came back to Kernel Recipes.
He was a godfather, precisely. He was in quite bad shape, but it’s also about showing the human side. Indeed, of all these people, work behind their screens, have their problems, etc. And it also allowed us to raise problems of community management. At the time, he was going to do a talk on “what happens when I’m no longer here?”. There were a lot of emotions in the room, but it was super interesting.
Walid: I’m asking you a question just before I forget, but I’m interested. Are the conferences filmed? Because typically, this one, I really want to go and listen to it.
Anne: All the conferences are filmed. So, they are offered live. That is to say during the conference. And then we record them and they are re-offered afterwards. We broadcast them on YouTube. We have a Kernel Recipes channel. It’s classified by year and everything is available there.
The Impact of COVID on Kernel Recipes
Walid: Throughout the chain of events, I understand that overall, it worked well, one edition after the other. You mentioned it earlier, but what did Covid do? Did it change things? Was it just a parenthesis and you started again?
Anne: When Covid arrived, we were asked the question, are you going to do it remotely? And in fact, we said no, we’re not going to do it, we’re going to interrupt each other, because the characteristic of this conference, precisely, is to promote exchanges, face-to-face contacts.
It was against, in a way, the DNA of the conference to go into distance learning mode. So, we stopped. It took a long time because indeed, two years in a row, we were forced to cancel. That’s why we scheduled a slightly delayed date in June to try to resume as quickly as possible. People were super happy to be back together.
Walid : what has it changed?
Anne : I think the room is not as fast as it used to be because before Covid. Filling the room with Kernel Recipes, sometimes, it took an hour. That is to say, in one hour, all the tickets were finished. I know that there were some who made scripts, etc., to be able to connect, get tickets, etc. So, it was super fast.
After Covid, it took longer. I think that some people who used to travel to see the conferences live don’t do it anymore, for reasons X or Y, I don’t know.
That’s about it, for us, the impact that Covid has had. Afterwards, in terms of organization, it has changed absolutely nothing for us.
The choice of venues for the conference
Walid: ok. I was asking myself the question in terms of location. So then, at the beginning, you were at La Villette, then you moved to Mozilla. So afterwards, you have problems having places that are big enough, not too expensive. I wonder how you choose the places? Have you changed places a lot over the years?
Anne: So, we had La Villette and then Mozilla. One year, we found ourselves in a cinema next to the Opera, because the time frame was very short.
Mozilla, we thought we could keep the premises but in the end, it was no longer possible. So we had to find another venue very, very quickly. It wasn’t ideal, but it allowed us to do that year.
And then afterwards, we had to find a room. The criteria: there is the size, obviously, the cost, because the rooms in Paris are extremely expensive, and the conviviality. And in fact, we realized that the type of room was super important.
Also, there was its place in the atmosphere of the conference. At Mozilla, we were good, we had gilding on the walls, etc. It was a superb building. So, we tried to search according to that and we ended up at the Maison de la Belgique, at the Biermans-Lapôtre Foundation, in the university campus, where we found these three criteria.
And what’s more, what doesn’t spoil anything is that the price we put into the room is donated to the organization for the students. So, in a way, it’s two birds with one stone too. It fits perfectly into our way of looking at things.
So now, we’re good and we haven’t moved since: it’s the fourth year there. And frankly, it’s a very nice room with exteriors, etc. And the participants are really attached to that. We didn’t want to be in any amphitheater or a hotel or something like that, because it’s very, very impersonal in the end.
Embbeded Recipes
Walid: And before we finish on that part, I’d like you to talk about a project that started a little later, which is Embedded Recipes. Could you explain what it is and how you come to the idea that we need to create another conference?
Anne: So, in fact, after a while, we realized that the agenda, in the proposals that were also made to us, was filled with subjects that were related to embeddedness, with particular problems.
We tried to put it all together, but at some point, we said to ourselves, given the number of topics proposed, maybe we could do a conference dedicated to embedded devices? And that’s how Embedded Recipes was born.
And we said to ourselves: “we’re going to apply the same recipes. So, a track, same conviviality, informal recipe, etc.” And so, for 4 years, we did 3 days of Kernel Recipes, and then 2 days of Embedded Recipes. It worked pretty well. It was a little more difficult to fill in because there are more events on the embedded, very clearly, than on the kernel. The audience is not quite the same, it’s much more corporate than on the kernel. But it worked pretty well, it held up pretty well.
Except that it took us a lot of time and five days of conference is downright exhausting. After a while, we said to ourselves that our attachment is to Kernel Recipes, it’s the event we did at the beginning. And we tried to see if anyone wanted to take over this event, Embedded Recipes, while respecting the basic principles.
And it turns out that in our environment, in those who also worked on Kernel Recipes, there were people from the Baylibre company, whom we know very well and who shared the same opinions as us on the organization of the conference. So basically, we passed the baby back to them. They did the first year in Paris. And now, it’s organized in Nice, since they are originally from Nice.
Walid: There are worse places, you know.
Anne: It gets worse.
Walid: And same recipe, and with a gauge of how many people?
Anne: It’s the same type of thing, 120-130 people. It’s really the same principles modeled on a different subject.
Financing
Walid: The next part, very important, I think, is the financing part. Earlier, you explained that the entrance fee was around 60 euros including tax, which is really cheap. And so how do you manage to finance all this preparation work and then welcome people? We haven’t talked about meals, etc. But how do you manage to finance that? What sponsors do you have? Because it’s hard to find sponsors.
Anne: So, on the financing, it’s a bit of a nerve of war, indeed. Now, what we have to sponsor is the room, the meals (since it is systematically offered to all the participants), the breaks, t-shirts, little things like that.
All this, indeed, must hold up with a price that is not too high for entry to the conference. So sponsors have a key role in this. We have sponsors who have been following us almost since the beginning, who are very loyal. So that’s great because we know that we can count on them every year. They are there.
For the past two or three years, it’s been a little more complicated. The context is a bit tense at all levels, indeed, we feel that it’s a little more difficult. But they’re still there, it’s being renewed, we have newcomers. Knowing that what we’re imposing on them is: “you contribute to financing the conference, but on the other hand, you don’t necessarily have a talk that is guaranteed”. There is no commercial space, except for the logo on the badges, the video, etc. They had to have that in mind.
Walid: Is there no stand?
Anne: There’s no stand, no. And for the moment, it’s working pretty well. I have to say that they play the game pretty much. They’re simply looking for development forces on the core. And the fact that they have visibility on that too, it also helps to collect applications, for example.
Walid: Do you want to mention, for example, main sponsors so that we can get an idea of what type of company is interested in sponsoring such an event?
Anne: Digital giants, for example, Meta which is there regularly. We have manufacturers, for example. ARM, AMD. We have a French company, HAProxy. It’s one of the few French companies, unfortunately. We have service companies like Igalia, Collabora. This year, we’re going to announce it, it will be a little first here, we have Qualcomm, for example, which is opening up to Open Source and therefore offered itself this year. So there you have it, we still have interesting companies that also give us visibility in terms of conferences.
Walid: The question I also ask myself is what is the relationship between the organization of this event and your own company? Are they two different things? All this preparation work, you pass it on to his company. Does it bring you professionally to organize this conference?
Anne: For my part, whether it’s in the previous company or the current company, it’s our way of doing communication. And which, in addition, in a productive way, since it’s contribution. In a way, it’s also a contribution to open source. So, we found it interesting.
Today I do it. On my time in the company, even if it’s not always counted. But I do think it’s part of my job to do this kind of thing.
Walid: In what way do you highlight your work, the work of your company, in the conference?
Anne: Very little. Apart from the logo that appears on the badges, the kakemonos, things like that, I put very little forward because as for the sponsors, our idea is really not to highlight one box rather than another but to highlight the exchanges of the conference, what it eventually brings to the community. But it’s not a commercial event so voluntarily, we don’t put ourselves forward at all.
Walid: For you, the benefits are direct or rather indirect? Is it more that people come to contact you because we met you? Or is it more that you have contacts that make it interesting for your work at some point?
Anne: Well, I don’t even have direct contact. Well, it’s not directly. On the other hand, me, in my business card, in my CV, when I go to sell my services, I say that I contributed to Mageia, I say that I worked at Mandriva, that I organize Kernel Recipes. It makes for an interesting package. It makes a profile that differentiates itself from the others and that’s super interesting. And then, incidentally, it’s something I love to do, so it’s a nice compromise for me.
Communication around Kernel Recipes
Walid: yes, that’s cool. If we talk about communication now, what I’d like to know is how do you, the organization, advertise the event if there’s such a craze? Do you need to really advertise? And by the way, what kind of advertising do you do? What types of posts? How do you announce that?
Anne: So before, we had a Twitter account that we closed, for various reasons. We do a lot on Mastodon today, because it’s become a place where, indeed, it relays a lot. Bluesky, a little less, but we still do it, on LinkedIn, for the professional side, it works pretty well. On LinuxFR… We have our position every year too, where it gives us a lot of spin-offs. And usually, that’s enough. And after that, it’s a lot, a lot of word of mouth.
Walid: Do the companies that are partners, that are sponsors, also rotate in their own network?
Anne: Absolutely, yes.
Walid: And so, you are the one who does the communication yourself, the posts?
Anne: It’s very artisanal, the site, the posts. In short, everything is done [internally], indeed.
Walid: And by the way, the videos of the conference, whether it’s live or after, where can we find them? I’ll put them after, all in description, of course.
Anne: The live, in fact, we broadcast the link every day during the conference on all the social media we can use. So, it’s a trial that it’s accessible quickly. And then, the videos, it’s a YouTube channel. So, we’ve been criticized quite a bit, indeed, for using this medium. There are very few of us. We don’t have a lot of time, necessarily, to test other solutions. Maybe there are others that would be preferable. I don’t know. In any case, this does the job. And indeed, all the videos since the beginning are on YouTube, on the Kernel Recipes channel.
Investment in human terms for the organization
Walid: OK, it works. We talked about it a little, but what interested me was to make people understand everything, to organize a conference like this, what is it in terms of human and personal investment? Is it a work that is condensed over the last 3, 4, 5 months before the conference? Is it a work over the whole year? Is it a job where you can do it on your professional time or are you also forced to do a little on the side on your personal time? Basically, to give people an idea, to organize something like this, what is it in terms of investment?
Anne: So, there are very few of us at the conference. Overall, if I had to sum up, I’m actually doing all the preparation. There’s Erwan, my husband, who also does this out of passion for this conference, who helps me to hunt down sponsors a bit, to do communication, and especially on the day of the event.
That’s about it. There aren’t many of us, so we avoid a lot of endless discussions that aren’t necessarily very constructive and we save a lot of time on that, I think.
After that, it’s a job that runs from the beginning of January to the end of September. So at the beginning of January, it’s the start of the search for sponsors, the reminders, the manufacture of the brochure (we have them do that anyway to have something more or less correct), to present the conference to the new sponsors.
It’s the search for the sponsor too, for each year, and then the development of the agenda, that’s what takes the most time. And this time, it’s very fragmented and can be very condensed. It’s during the day, in the evening, sometimes at night, when we’re not in the same time zone. And then afterwards, the work really starts up again at the beginning of September, where it’s the last elements of preparation, the room, the sponsors, the budgets, the meal, etc.
Walid: Do you ever have people who say no to sponsorship?
Anne: No, well, yes, there was one who told us no, but because he wasn’t actually available the year in question and that it would be the following year. But no, for the moment, we’ve only had yeses.
The Kernel Recipes Edition 2026
Walid: ok. And precisely, in this year 2026, what can we expect? Are there any particularities? So the program is already online?
Anne: The program is online. It’s almost complete. We’re just missing talk descriptions, but almost everything is there.
Walid: How many are there?
Anne: 20 talks over 3 days. The sponsor is Jonathan Corbet from LWN, who will do a talk himself. It’s not completely decided yet, so it’s going to be a bit of a surprise. And then on the agenda, it’s very varied. There are things about development, about C, about Rust. There are things, for example, about security, about QoS. There are things about testing tools.
There are things about AI, both about the use of AI, but also about the problems it poses in terms of community organization. We have a talk we did at FOSDEM that we really liked on Git, which will allow us to have what’s to come on Git, and that was very interesting. So it’s also the tools that surround the development of the kernel. What could I talk about? It’s going to talk about memory, it’s going to talk about databases, in short, the topics are extremely varied.
Walid: Do you have any anecdotes to share, things that went wrong or funny things to share with the listeners of the podcast?
Anne: So already, the creation around the barbecue, we already thought it was funny.
There was once a rather funny anecdote. We have one of the speakers who is not necessarily a developer on the kernel but who is rather a user. He came to talk about his experience, his first patch on the Linux kernel and the difficulties he had encountered. This person had seen his enthusiasm seriously dampened by the maintainer of the network, who is not known to be extremely easy on the mailing list, but simply because he was simply overwhelmed. And he almost gave up after that. And it so happens that the year he did this conference, there was in the room, precisely, as speaker, the maintainer of the network stack.
And during the evenings that are organized, during the conference, we put them both in contact. And we explained to the network maintainer how very, very badly he had experienced that moment. And we saw someone extremely human break down completely and realize, indeed, that it could have a very strong impact, but also explaining that they had an absolutely phenomenal job every day and that indeed, what was going on inside an email was not necessarily what they would have said if they had been in person, for example.
And so, it gave rise to some really nice discussions, in fact, between a maintainer and a contributor. That’s a little anecdote that is quite revealing, I think, of the state of mind of the conference.
Walid: I’d put the link to another of the conferences. I don’t remember what the speaker’s name was, but he had spoken in one of your editions, someone I think from Netflix, who had spoken about the subject, about the fact that when you arrive, you may be thrown out, but everyone will be thrown out.
And that, in fact, it’s the way to operate to keep a certain level. And because people don’t have the time. So, it’s not personal, but just that, basically, everyone is going to be treated the same.
Anne: When you talk to them, you realize that these are people who don’t work day and night, but almost, who have almost no vacations, who are completely overwhelmed, who are passionate about what they do, and who are simply overwhelmed.
It’s true that the human side on the mailing list, so it misses a little bit. And then, we had, precisely, with Greg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer of the stable kernel, we had a live release, a live kernel release. That is to say, he did this to us with his laptop. In fact, he simply created a live stable version that was broadcast on the mirrors. So that was the nice side, indeed, to show the production of the kernel.
Walid: Was that filmed?
Anne: It was filmed so I have to watch with a small mention, Kernel was in the description of the release Kernel Recipes etc it was funny.
[Another anecdote reported by Anne: Paul McKenney , co-maintainer RCU in the kernel who explains the latency with toilet paper]
Anne’s closing remarks
Walid: oh yes great, I’m going to spend some more time watching conferences. Before we conclude I’d like to leave you a last word if you have something to say, if you also have thanks to do yes what would you like to say before we leave
Anne: It’s a lot of time to organize a conference, but it’s a real enrichment. For me, it’s my breath of fresh air in the year.
In a year where you work a lot, it’s really, that’s it, you go to others. And really, you shouldn’t hesitate to get involved.
All conferences are looking for volunteers. I’m thinking, for example, of FOSDEM, where they’re constantly looking for volunteers. And really, you shouldn’t hesitate to introduce yourself, to spend a little time on it. It’s also a contribution to free software. That’s how we bring these events to life. And we lack them. So, you really, really shouldn’t hesitate.
Walid: I have to admit that to prepare, when I asked you, Anne and Erwan, if you had ever talked before all this, when you gave me a link to a video on YouTube that was seen by quite a few people, I said to myself, “ok, it’s going to be interesting if you’ve never told, if you’ve never told the story of Kernel Recipes, it’s going to be quite interesting to see this and to share this experience with other people”.
Anne: Yes.
Walid: Look, we’ll stop there. It was really interesting. Thank you very much. I hope we can have you in the years to come. I just launched, a few days ago, a new 10-minute format to present an edition of a conference. So, I hope that in future editions, you will be able to come and present the next editions.
For the listeners, I invite you, of course, to go and watch, to read Kernel Recipes’ posts on LinuxFr, of course, and to watch the videos on YouTube, as I started to do. After that, it’s time that is running out…
Anne, thank you very much for your time. And then see you next one.
Anne: Thank you.
Walid: Maybe we’ll meet again in other conferences.
Anne: No problem, thank you.
Walid: Thank you.
To go further
Episode production
- Remote recording on August 11, 2026
- Basis: Walid Nouh
- Editing: Walid Nouh
- Transcript proofreading: Anne Nicolas & Erwan Velu
This interview has been automatically translated from the original language into English.
Many thanks to Michael Opdenacker for his impressions and experience with Kernel Recipes.
Use of AI
You can consult our AI charter.
Production:
- Noise reduction in Audacity via OpenVino and the DeepNetFilter2 model
- Transcript: whisper-medium
- Transcription Improvement: Kimi K2.6
Publication:
- English translation of social media posts: Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct
- Thumbnail: Claude Design
License
This podcast is released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license or later