Speaking tomorrow at OpenFest

The organizers very kindly invited me to speak at OpenFest in Sofia, Bulgaria. My talk tomorrow is entitled Why Kernel Space Sucks.

That title is of course a reference to the highly amusing presentation of a few years ago by kernel hacker Dave Jones entitled Why Userspace Sucks (MagicPoint presentation). (For the PDF of Dave's complete paper presented at Linux Symposium 2006, look here; LWN.net has a nice tl;dr summary.)

Dave's presentation was all about the ways in which various userspace systems and applications kill performance by wasting system resources on pointless tasks. I'm not contradicting anything that Dave says, but it seems at least fair to point out that there are places where kernel space sucks too. My talk is about one of those places with special interest to me--the kernel-userspace programming interface--a place where kernel developers have inflicted a steady stream of small train wrecks (to borrow Dave's term) on userspace.