The 8th Linux Foundation Japan Symposium took place last week in Tokyo.  The goal of these symposiums is to bring leading Linux luminaries to present and interact with local senior software developers, with the goal of increasing open source participation by talented Japanese developers and also fostering Linux usage in the Japanese IT industry.

Andrew Morton was on hand to speak about the status and direction of kernel development, covering kernel process material and specifically highlighting areas that need to be worked on including solid state disks and the linux-next tree.

James Morris presented on the SE Linux project, Thomas Gleixner spoke about the advantages of the Completely Fair Scheduler and Paul Moore talked about labeled networking.  Toshiharu Harada,project manager of TOMOYO Linux, was  able to explain to the developers in attendance about how to participate in Linux development and provided words of encouragement to other young developers like himself.

While the majority of the audience came from Japan, attendees came from throughout Asia.  The audience consisted almost completely of developers attending from such companies as NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NTT, Sony, Toshiba, Canon and Red Hat and from universities including Tokyo University and Waseda University.  An audience survey revealed that the areas of most interest to the attendees included server, desktop and embedded with the largest technical interests focused on virtualization, process scheduler and file systems, in that order.

Andrew Morton informed the audience that about 15% of current kernel contributions are now coming from Japan - something we hope the Japan Symposiums have contributed to.

For more information on the 8th Linux Foundation Japan Symposium, please visit the following:

All speaker slides posted on LF Japan’s website: http://www.linux-foundation.jp/modules/eguide/event.php?eid=10

James Morris’ notes, photos and slides: http://james-morris.livejournal.com/31240.html