You might not know SUSE Labs beforehand, its the group of people who hacks on low level toolchain stuff like gcc (GNU Compiler Collection) , gdb (GNU Debugger) , binutils and others. So you can expect deep technical talks at the conference, starting with the Link Time Optimization (LTO) in GCC talk on Sunday by Jan Hubicka who works at suse.cz (SUSE Czech Republic) and is a prominent gcc hacker for quite a long time. LTO is a hot topic for any software project given the fact that it improves the overall application performance in most cases. So if you want to squueze more performance out of your own project(s), you shouldn’t miss Jan’s talk.

On Monday another member of suse.cz Jiri Slaby will give a talk titled Static Code Checking — the State of the Art . Recently static code checking got more exposure with the bugs found in projects like Apple’s clang C/C++ compiler, Google’s Chrome web browser and also id Software’s John Carmack praising the process for finding the bugs in their upcoming game title Rage. So if you are found of coding in a static language like C/C++ you should be attending this talk. Also during the day, visitors will also have a chance to attend the gdb workshop to teach some tricks to our beloved debugger gdb. Given that gdb is a powerful tool with an awkward interface I hope to learn more about using it like a pro.

If you are interested in the kernel development, you will be happy to know that two kernel debugging sessions Setting up and Analyzing Kernel Crash Dumps and Kernel Debugging / Instrumentation with Systemtap will be presented by Stefan Seyfried and Michel Rode from B1 Systems GmbH. Also yours truly, together with Vincent Untz will do a workshop titled How to contribute to Factory to get our hands dirty on the basic openSUSE Factory packaging and submission workflow. We hope to give a basic to intermediate introduction to openSUSE Factory packaging with solutions to common encountered problems.

Tuesday starts with another kernel debugging talk Linux IO Tracing by Jan Kara which will be followed by another talk from Jiri Slaby titled Automatic Regression Testing which hopefully will be interesting for all developers. In the evening there will an Advanced Packaging talk by Lars Vogdtand and Pascal Bleser which might teach you a packaging trick or two.

If performance is your thing, you shouldn’t miss Monitoring with Performance Co-Pilot talk by David Disseldorp on Friday. And just before we wrap up the conference Conny Seidel from AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) will give a talk titled Linux Testing – Complexity in a nutshell which will give an overview of Linux testing architecture used over in AMD. It will be interesting to learn about a real-world Linux testing setup.

So that was a small glimpse of what is coming. Remember that registration for openSUSE Conference is free, so hop over here for registration. We hope to see you there!