These two conferences are more technology oriented, but they do attract me more than those academic confs.

An even nice thing about them is that their proceedings are free online!

They are really worth checking out, so I summarize some of them below:


Recent Developments in GDB outlines major changes in GDB from GDB 6.0, which was released in Oct. 2003. FYI, the latest version of GDB in Debian sid is 6.4.90.dfsg-1.

The features of interest to me are: checkpoints and improved support for processes, threads, and DWARF 2 (which allows for elimination of duplicate debugger info, and separation of debug info and executable file. Sounds attracting to Dan?). The newly introduced commands are listed in Section 6.


Real reverse debugging hasn't been implemented in GDB yet. There're many solutions proposed, including using a VMM. A proprietary but free (free as in free beer) implementation that resembles gdb a lot is now provided by undodb. As how gdb supports checkpoints, a lot of processes are forked.


GCC-An Architectural Overview, Current Status, and Future Directions and Changes to RTL Dataflow Analysis are must-read papers that demystify gcc. The latter talks about a branch of gcc that replaces outdated flow.c with df-*.c.

Other papers accepted to GCC Summit mainly talk about specific optimizations.


Improving the Approach to Linux Performance Analysis provides an overview and comparison of kernel performance analysis tools such as systemtap, kprobes, oprofile, and so on.


The sysfs Filesystem and Dynamic Device Handling on the Modern Desktop talk about sysfs and its applications, udev and HAL. LFS's notes on udev are also worth reading.


Virtualization is in no doubt an extremely hot topic recently. Evolution in Kernel Debugging using Hardware Virtualization With Xen in particular talks about kernel debugging using Xen 3.0, which avoids kernel patching with the support of Intel VT. Here is the page that lists Intel processors with VT support.

There are of course other interesting papers such as how to benchmark laptop battery life.