"No matter if you are dealing with the latest tech or trying to maintain something from the dark ages of the ‘90s, there are people at LISA who are experienced with it. Heck, many of the people who _developed_ this tech attend. This is a great place to get answers and ideas."
Lee Damon, University of Washington
"I like seeing where the industry is heading, how SysAdmins/engineers are evolving, tools they are using, common problems and solutions across the world."
LISA14 Attendee
"If you're a sysadmin slaving away in a metaphorical basement and re-inventing the wheel every time your employer's business goals change slightly, LISA will help pull you into the light."
Marc Chiarini, Long-Time IT Admin and Researcher, MarkLogic Corp
"This was my first LISA. It was great attending a conference that focused on my role without trying to shoehorn every challenge into a specific vendor's solution. The same mix of awesome sessions, speakers, and other attendees will bring me back every year."
LISA14 Attendee
"LISA is the home of ops people who do ops correctly. I’m always motivated by the conference content and hallway conversations to be better, and I take home the knowledge needed to move closer to that goal. "
Tony Del Porto, Cisco Systems, Inc.
"Great sessions, great presenters, great community. I feel like I can make up a year of following news and forums on the subject in a week."
LISA14 Attendee
"In a world where technology changes rapidly, it's hard to find great resources for in-depth expertise. LISA has a terrific combination of people who create the technology and people who implement it effectively for their companies."
Matt Simmons, Northeastern University
"LISA is the best mix of training, talks, and networking of any events I've been to. That's the reason I've been to 11 of them.”
The Morning Session (Part 1) of this tutorial is FULL.
Insufficient knowledge of operating system internals is my most common reason for passing on an interview candidate. Anyone can learn that you run tool X to fix problem Y. But what happens when there is no tool X, or when you can't even accurately pinpoint the root cause of why "It's sometimes slow."
This will be a no-holds-barred, fury-road-paced review of all major parts of modern operating systems with specific emphasis on what's important for system administrators. It will provide just enough of an academic focus to bridge the "whys" so you can make better use of fiddling with the "whats" on a day-to-day basis. As an added bonus, it will prime you for the following day's "Linux Performance Tuning" tutorial with Theodore Ts'o.
You will learn about process management, scheduling, file system architecture and internals, interrupt management, the mysteries of the MMU and TLB, belady's anomaly, page replacement algorithms and hopefully a bit of networking. In a nutshell, we'll cover 16 weeks of college-level material in a few hours.
Buckle up.
Who should attend:
All admins who did not take the Comp-Sci academic route and never had a course in OS internals
Inexperienced admins whose coursework or training didn't include the kind of OS internals that they should (modern OS courses have become a shadow of their former selves and commonly require writing no OS code)
More experienced admins who haven't really had to address these sorts of issues on a regular basis who probably know a lot about some individual aspects but could benefit from everything being put into a broader context
Take back to work:
Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of what goes on inside the kernel and the areas where things can go wrong. We'll explore how little the concept of "system load" captures about the true system state, and attendees will be prepared to improve both their operational response methodologies as well as their monitoring goals.
Topics include:
Morning:
Scheduling and Process Management
Memory Management and the MMU
Virtualization and its impact on these
Afternoon:
File System Architecture (for sysadmins covering ext (2, 3, 4), NTFS, and ZFS)
Storage layer performance, disks, RAID, and SANs
The impact of virtualization on these
Additional Materials:
All attendees should have either a laptop running Linux, or a VM with a recent copy of Linux installed to assist in the hands-on exploration activities.
