I left off about a year ago when I succeeded in getting an older version of Debian on it, but attempts to get the tooling to install a more broadly supported version of U-Boot to the SPI flash were unsuccessful. Then I got pulled away to other things, effectively just bringing my VF2 around to events as a prop for my multiarch talks – which it did beautifully! I even had one conference attendee buy one to play with while sitting in the audience of my talk. Cool.

I was delighted to learn how much progress had been made since I last looked. Canonical has published more formalized documentation: Install Ubuntu on the StarFive VisionFive 2 in the place of what had been a rather cluttered wiki page. So I got all hooked up and began my latest attempt.

My first step was to grab the pre-installed server image. I got that installed, but struggled a little with persistence once I unplugged the USB UART adapter and rebooted. I then decided just to move forward with the Install U-Boot to the SPI flash instructions. I struggled a bit here for two reasons:

1. The documentation today leads off with having you download the livecd, but you actually want the pre-installed server image to flash U-Boot, the livecd step doesn’t come until later. Admittedly, the instructions do say this, but I wasn’t reading carefully enough and was more focused on the steps.
2. I couldn’t get the 24.10 pre-installed image to work for flashing U-Boot, but once I went back to the 24.04 pre-installed image it worked.

And then I had to fly across the country. We’re spending a couple weeks around spring break here at our vacation house in Philadelphia, but the good thing about SBCs is that they’re incredibly portable and I just tossed my gear into my backpack and brought it along.

Thanks to Emil Renner Berthing (esmil) on the Ubuntu Matrix server for providing me with enough guidance to figure out where I had gone wrong above, and got me on my way just a few days after we arrived in Philly.

With the newer U-Boot installed, I was able to use the Ubuntu 24.04 livecd image on a micro SD Card to install Ubuntu 24.04 on an NVMe drive! That’s another new change since I last looked at installation, using my little NVMe drive as a target was a lot simpler than it would have been a year ago. In fact, it was rather anticlimactic, hah!

And with that, I was fully logged in to my new system.

elizabeth@r2kt:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
hart : 2
isa : rv64imafdc_zicntr_zicsr_zifencei_zihpm_zba_zbb
mmu : sv39
uarch : sifive,u74-mc
mvendorid : 0x489
marchid : 0x8000000000000007
mimpid : 0x4210427
hart isa : rv64imafdc_zicntr_zicsr_zifencei_zihpm_zba_zbb

It has 4 cores, so here’s the full output: vf2-cpus.txt

What will I do with this little single board computer? I don’t know yet. I joked with my husband that I’d “install Debian on it and forget about it like everything else” but I really would like to get past that. I have my little multiarch demo CI project in the wings, and I’ll probably loop it into that.

Since we were in Philly, I had a look over at my long-neglected Raspberry Pi 1B that I have here. When we first moved in, I used it as an ssh tunnel to get to this network from California. It was great for that! But now we have a more sophisticated network setup between the houses with a VLAN that connects them, so the ssh tunnel is unnecessary. In fact, my poor Raspberry Pi fell off the WiFi network when we switched to 802.1X just over a year ago and I never got around to getting it back on the network. I connected it to a keyboard and monitor and started some investigation. Honestly, I’m surprised the little guy was still running, but it’s doing fine!

And it had been chugging along running Rasbian based on Debian 9. Well, that’s worth an upgrade. But not just an upgrade, I didn’t want to stress the device and SD card, so I figured flashing it with the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS was the right way to go. It turns out, it’s been a long time since I’ve done a Raspberry Pi install.

I grabbed the Raspberry Pi Imager and went on my way. It’s really nice. I went with the Raspberry Pi OS Lite install since it’s the RP1, I didn’t want a GUI. The imager asked the usual installation questions, loaded up my SSH key, and I was ready to load it up in my Pi.

The only thing I need to finish sorting out is networking. The old USB WiFi adapter I have it in doesn’t initialize until after it’s booted up, so wpa_supplicant on boot can’t negotiate with the access point. I’ll have to play around with it. And what will I use this for once I do, now that it’s not an SSH tunnel? I’m not sure yet.

I realize this blog post isn’t very deep or technical, but I guess that’s the point. We’ve come a long way in recent years in support for non-x86 architectures, so installation has gotten a lot easier across several of them. If you’re new to playing around with architectures, I’d say it’s a really good time to start. You can hit the ground running with some wins, and then play around as you go with various things you want to help get working. It’s a lot of fun, and the years I spent playing around with Debian on Sparc back in the day definitely laid the groundwork for the job I have at IBM working on mainframes. You never know where a bit of technical curiosity will get you.

Monday morning kicked off by going over to the Secure Open Source Software (SOSS) Community Day for the morning. I particularly enjoyed the keynote from Kate Stewart about the state of Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs). I remember when discussion of SBOMs in the open source world started picking up, also with Kate being a spokesperson for them, and at the time reflected upon how useful they’d be if they ever caught on. It feels like the increased focus on security due to some high profile vulnerabilities is what accelerated the interest and need for them and having a full keynote devoted to them at a security event seems to have confirmed my suspicions. It was great to get an overview of the types of SBOMs that exist (binary vs. source, where they are in phase of development/deployment), but also to learn how many governments have started mandating SBOMs to track what software they’re using. They’ve really hit their stride, and also launched SPDX 3.0, the latest in their iterations of “an open standard capable of representing systems with software components in as SBOMs.”

Monday afternoon took me over to CHAOSScon. I learned from their latest Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project overview that they have a OSPO Metrics Working Group, which may be right up my alley these days. CHAOSS is one of those projects that I remember being launched and always wanted to be involved with, but never managed to make time for. I am concerned that’s still the case, but it was nice to check in with the community so I can more effectively determine whether it’s something I can finally carve out time for. We did an interactive workshop where we shared some thoughts and ideas, and then concluded with updates from a few of their projects, including the announcement of GrimoireLab 1.0 and an update from Augur.

I followed my friends (old and new!) to a CHOASScon after event at a nearby bar where I got to chat with a woman I met whose company was exploring their open source stack and thinking about building out an OSPO. It was nice having that conversation, as well as catching up with a bunch of folks.

Tuesday moved us beyond Community Day and officially kicked off the Open Source Summit, where we were welcomed to a series of keynotes that jumped right in with the topic of AI and work that’s going into enterprise-readiness with the launch of the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA). It was also nice to see quantum readiness mentioned. A keynote on Valkey, a Redis successor, also caught my attention, as there was a recent proposal to drop s390x support from it (thankfully a quick chat at their booth hopefully resolved this, hooray for conferences!).

Beyond the keynotes, it was generally a good day for talks. Kara Sowles of GitHub gave a great talk on open source funding (hint: there’s not nearly enough of it) and I went to a talk by my former colleague, Javier Perez, on some trends in open source software gathered from a survey that was concluded last year. Joe Winchester delighted with a talk on “Software in Space: Lessons Every Developer Can Learn From” where he took several examples of failures (or near failures) in space missions and drew parallels as to what software developers could learn. I think we all geeked out a bit over space science in that one.

Then for lunch I met up with Maemalynn Meanor of The Open Mainframe Project so I’d have a pal at the Women and Non-Binary Lunch, which is always a pleasure to attend.

Tuesday evening I made it over to a Open Source Summit [unofficial] AI Meetup After Hours which had a series of short talks from folks in the community to present their work, and what ultimately led to discussing ways they could collaborate, which was great to see. One of the things that came up was that even within the Linux Foundation community there is duplication of effort happening as everyone sees the same problems inside their own projects, meetups like this help break down those barriers.

Wednesday morning keynotes began with a “fireside chat” with Linus Torvalds, where he notably (for me) talked about RISC-V and concerns that they’d duplicate mistakes of past architectures when it came to software. When I stopped by the RISC-V booth later in the day it was clear that hit a nerve, and inspired some action in that community to make sure then don’t. He also seems to have come to the logical conclusion that the AI wave is not really worth the hype, but there is something there that we’d be wise to keep up with. Speaking of which, another keynote touched upon the rise of code being generated by AI tooling, and the need for securing our communities against manipulation that can happen to the source code bases that the AI is drawing from, underlining again that we need to bring trust and validation directly to open source projects.

After lunch I gave my talk on “How Our Mainframe-Focused Working Group Solved Our Linux Distribution Maintainer Isolation Problem” where, just like SCALE, I found myself with a small but deeply engaged audience. I also learned that while a handful of people in the room where focused on the topic, most of the questions were specifically related to mainframes, which I was also happy to answer! It was nice validation that there is appetite for the topic at events, and maybe I’ll re-focus on the technology at the next event I propose for, rather than going for a more social talk. Still, I was very happy I gave it, and some great contacts seem to have been made both for myself and for some audience members who got chatting afterwards.

Thursday was when the realization that I was on day eight of travel finally hit me and I started feeling a bit tired and I switched to mostly spending time in the expo hall meeting with people rather than trying to focus on sessions. Throughout my expo hall adventures I got to meet up with some friends from the Ubuntu community, a contact who I’d only spoken with online from OpenPOWER, and dozens of people I’ve known through various times in my career, who I’ve always been able to geek out with, regardless of my current focus – including mainframes!

Still, I caught the keynotes which were, once again, a bit AI-heavy. It’s important though, I know the tech industry is saturated with AI at the moment, but one of the things the Linux Foundation has the opportunity to be a steward of is the responsible development and use of it, so I’m grateful to see that coming together. Thursday was also delightfully broken up by the ability to pet some animals. I chose the rabbits.

The Open Source Summit is the largest open source events I attend, so I was really grateful to be back after the pandemic hiatus. I had a plan for the week, and accomplished most of what I planned on, but was constantly surprised at other opportunities that sprung up when I met with people. As valuable as the regional conferences are (and they ARE), this one is definitely the best conference of the year for core open source networking.

But first, I made a stop at the IBM office in Austin where I met up with my colleagues Daniel and Chris. I met Daniel at a taco truck where I had a much-needed post-flight lunch, and then he gave me a tour of the office. I even managed to find a random, roaming IBM Selectric II typewriter!

Then I got to enjoy happy hour out with several other folks from the office before returning back to my hotel for the night.

The first day of the conference I mostly spent meeting people and in the expo hall chatting with folks from Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. They both have builds for s390x, so it was really nice to finally meet the folks I’ve worked with online, and talk with them in person about their current utilization and changes in needs. And that evening I was able to grab dinner and ice cream with my contact at Rocky Linux.

The second day was the one that was filled with talks. The event kicked off with a keynote from Anita Zhang about her career, and how unexpected choices at various stages led to the success she’s found today. From there I went directly to a talk by Matt Mullins of the Connections Museum Seattle titled “The oldest Linux peripheral” where he talked about a panel switch from 1923 that’s now hooked up to a Linux box to manage operations. It was a really cool talk, and looks to be a fascinating museum with a lot of old telecommunications equipment. The hours they’re open don’t line up with my upcoming visit to Seattle, but maybe next time, I know it’s something MJ would love to see.

From there I went to a talk from Paul Novarese on “The Legacy of Log4Shell and the Future of DevSecOps” where he gave a bit of a tour of the open source security landscape, and shared statistics around the exponentially growing number of open source projects and versions available, along with the corresponding rise in CVE assignments and NIST Vulnerability Database analysis work. Some of his observations centered around the fact that these procedures were developed at a time when the open source ecosystem was a lot smaller, and the dependency chain was somewhat less abstracted (or at least, less complicated). He talked about SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) that can help organizations get a handle on the supply chain, but analysis and fixes also have to keep up so you have data to search for in that SBOM as you look for vulnerable software.

I took lunch a little early so I could prepare for my talk, and ended up at Terry Black’s BBQ across the street from the venue.

My talk on “Why (and how) would you run Linux on the Mainframe?” went well! It was well-attended and I think about half the attendees had a passing familiarity with mainframes, but a lot of the audience was new to the topic, which is about what I’d expect at a Linux event these days. People had great questions and it was really fun to geek out about it for the rest of the event, even at the after party for the conference the questions and discussions continued over drinks.

From there I went to Kyle J. Davis’ talk “Container Optimized Linux: The best idea you’re probably not using.” He had worked with Bottlerocket, but Flatcar and Talos are also in the host container OS space, and while I vaguely knew they existed, this was the first time I sat down and dedicated a few minutes to hear someone talk about them. The slim model they have for these distributions makes a lot of sense, since you really do only need a tiny, secure, environment to actually run the containers on, and everything can be externally orchestrated. While not directly applicable to me right now (IBM has done a lot of work on our own secure container environments), it is something I’ll keep in mind if the opportunity arises.

The final talk I attended before lightning talks and closing was around the Fedora work with Asahi Linux to bring it to the ARM-based Apple macs. I don’t have a great interest in this hardware specifically, but I always enjoy hearing about other architecture porting work that’s happening, and it was interesting to see the challenges that they’re presented with, along with progress and solutions.

For dinner before the after party I ended up eating with folks I knew from the OpenStack, and broadly, the Fedora community, before we all walked over to the Gibson Street Bar. I was feeling a little tired at this point, but I ended up staying clear through until 10PM. I then took a short detour over to a mailbox to send off a post card for the boys before retiring to my hotel.

Today is Sunday and I’m off on my next adventure: Seattle for the Open Source Summit!

In order to celebrate hitting the milestone of 60 years since the release, IBM hosted internal events around the world. I happened to be in Philadelphia during the celebration day on Thursday, April 4th, and decided to make the trek up to the place where much of the research and development, and ultimately the launch, happened back then: Poughkeepsie, NY. I’d been to the office once before, back in 2019, but I was definitely overdue for another visit to the IBM mainframe homeland. This was a perfect opportunity.

I took an Amtrak up from Trenton, through New York City where I was treated to visiting the beautiful new Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station.

From there I enjoyed the second leg of my journey that took me straight to Poughkeepsie, where I was met by the social media famous Pasquale “PJ” Catalano, who brought me to the office and introduced me to folks who worked on the test floor. Then I got to visit the test floor itself! He posts about it frequently on social media, what feels like a rare and remarkable glimpse inside an IBM facility, so I had a passing familiarity with various locations, but an in-person visit is something else entirely. 200+ mainframes humming away in various states of testing, it was like nowhere I’ve ever been!

It’s also a lovely datacenter. It’s obviously an active, used, test floor, but it’s well-organized and tidy, clearly the team has a level of discipline that many production data centers would envy. I think part of this comes from the culture at IBM in general, but I’m sure some of it is also hard-won from experience, if you fail to label something or are careless about routing, it will come back to haunt you, and waste a lot of time in the future.

I got to hold a memory chip and a heatsink for an IBM Telum for the first time!

Plus an actual dual-chip module holding a couple Telum chips (I had previously held just a Telum in a case back at TechXchange in September).

I got to check out a rack-mount z16 for the first time.

And to my delight I finally got to see the beautiful IBM LinuxONE doors!

Visiting the mainframes of today felt to be a truly fitting way to honor the 60 year legacy of the IBM System 360, but after getting to see some other mainframe goodies while PJ got some work done, we made our way to the cafeteria for the real party. The IBM Corporate Archives had put together a whole hallway of displays!

They even graciously honored PJ’s request to open up the IBM System 360 they had on display and let us get some pictures “inside” it. Bliss!

Let me tell you, I had a wonderful time geeking out with these folks. I’ve always loved history, and with my work in this space I’ve developed a true appreciation for how legendary IBM is, and this is the heart of it. I also fear I talked the ear off of one woman from the archives who had a typewriter skirt on, as I shared all about my collection. Next time I’m in Poughkeepsie I’m definitely going to ask to see their own typewriter and mechanical calculator collection.

From there we grabbed some lunch and then went to the celebration itself. I ran into several folks I didn’t know worked out of Poughkeepsie, so those were all delightful surprises. Career-wise I’ve definitely gained value in meeting up with colleagues in-person from time to time, as it really does help solidify those bonds that keep us working well together at a distance. I also finally got to meet our fearless leader in IBM Z and LinuxONE, Ross Mauri!

And then there was cake! After which I took some time to meet with a couple other colleagues, and concluded my day meeting with a long time friend who came down to visit from the IBM Quantum division. We had coffee and then he graciously dropped me back off at the train station for my 5:30 train back to Trenton.

In all, a long day but one that was incredibly satisfying. And I already have a list of people to talk to and things to see during my next visit, maybe some time over the summer?

This was the first large open source conference I’d been to in-person since 2020, so I had a wonderful time seeing familiar faces and catching up on several years of lost time. It was also a delight to meet so many new people. From the Community Leadership Summit, to curious college students at my mainframe talk, and volunteering at the Presto booth, I had many opportunities to interact with all sorts of folks who are new to the tech industry in general, and new to open source. It also made me feel a little old as I realized that I’ve been involved with open source communities for over two decades. Though I think parenthood and those new grey hairs peaking out at my temples are aiding with that too.

The conference kicked off on Sunday with a couple community events, and I attended the Community Leadership Summit. I’ve been to a few CLS events over the years, but it looks like the last one I was at was a CLSx event in 2017, co-located with Linux Conf AU. This event is un-conference-style with an introductory keynote about community topics, followed by development of the schedule for the day. My role in open source communities has shifted a lot since my last CLS, so it was interesting going to it this time with a very different “home” community. In some ways, the topics were less applicable to me, but some of them stood out. The first session I participated in discussed getting the next generation of contributors involved with communities, and that’s one my team at work spends a tremendous amount of time on, plus my own direct mentoring each summer. It was particularly nice having some folks who are the next generation in the room, so we didn’t fall into the trap of cliches and trying to figure out what they want instead of just asking them. Ultimately, it didn’t seem like the needs have changed significantly (don’t rush to set up that TikTok account), though there is a more mobile-first inclination and they are wisely more inclined to contribute to projects that make it clear and simple to get started.

The next session I went to was around social media use by communities in the post-Twitter era. This is a tough one for me. I made a real social media home on Twitter and the downfall as been a painful one. I’ve made a new home on Mastodon in the year since the change of ownership, but professionally the executives and companies I engage with are still on Twitter, and things like my local transit agency and parks are too, along with several funny/parody accounts that I follow. The first thing I realized from the discussion during this session was that it’s unlikely that this experience will be replicated anywhere. The “town square” that was Twitter seems to have an unusual cultural phenomenon, and with everyone scattering to different networks or groups quitting social media entirely, I ultimately don’t believe we’ll find everything we had there concentrated on another platform. Instead, we need to adapt and find new communities and networks, and change how we engage. It’s a sad realization, but one that set me free somewhat. I need to stop mourning what was lost and move on with full investment in new places. The session also caused me to stop putting effort into Bluesky. I haven’t found value in that network so far, and it’s just another for-profit company that I’m pouring my time into, why exactly? I figure if it takes off, I can always hop back on. For now, I’m being more thoughtful about precisely what I’m posting on Twitter versus Mastodon, with a focus on most of my work stuff going to Twitter with the exception of the very technical or “geeky” stuff, which goes to Mastodon, and I’ve scaled back the personal stuff I put on Twitter in favor of Mastodon, though I still do some. As for communities, I wish more open source communities made the leap to Mastodon, but what I’ve instead found is a lot of projects have simply given up on social media. When the APIs on Twitter died, they packed up and never came back anywhere. As a participant in a project that was reluctantly dragged into social media and once on it, automated everything, I understand that. Still, it was a fun way to engage that I’ll miss.

The last two sessions I went to at CLS were also interesting. The first was around how to use community metrics, and the dangers of using those metrics as a goal, rather than using them to make decisions about engagement efforts and strategies. There’s a fine line here that we stumbled over several times in the discussions, but I think a big chunk of it came from a disconnect between how Marketing and similar departments view engagement and how communities do. Ultimately it does seem like there are some metrics that can be used as goals, but not all of them, and they can’t be focused upon without further inspection and context with regard to the community. The final session had me join a former colleague from the OpenStack Infrastructure team as we discussed security in open source software. He provided an excellent tour of available resources and kept the floor open for questions and engagement, which I was grateful for because I had some very honest questions to ask that I trusted him to answer honestly (“How legit is $this_resource/group anyway? Should I spend time with them?”). It gave me some food for thought as I came back to the office the following week and had some discussions with my security-minded open source colleagues.

The evening wrapped up with an outdoor social at the conference venue, where I got to meet up with a few folks and then head back to my room early so I’d be well-rested for the first main conference day on Monday.

Monday began with a welcome from one of the most welcoming and kind people I know in open source, Todd Lewis, and then went into a keynote from the legendary Nithya Ruff. I loved Nithya’s keynote. She began by talking about happiness and how important it is for you to cultivate and grasp that for yourself. This was a segue into her main point about how your career is similar, but for me it resonated so strongly because the happiness question is one that has a hold on me right now. She’s absolutely right, whether it’s happiness or your career, you’re in charge of your own destiny.

I spent most of my post-keynote morning in the “hallway track” catching up with folks and then just before lunch I went to Jim Jagielski’s Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs). Since I am now the global head of a federated component of IBM’s main OSPO (as of this year, I run the new OSPO for IBM Z) I wanted to see if there was anything missing in my strategy, meet with some like-minded folks, and ask Jim if there were other organizations working with a federated OSPO model like IBM is. It was a good presentation and after speaking with Jim I definitely had a nice confidence boost about our strategy, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else is doing it this way. I guess IBM is a bit exceptional in some ways due to how big the company is and how specialized the technologies are in our various departments. I work with IBM Power a lot since we’re quite aligned, and IBM Quantum every time I can find an excuse to, so we do work closely, but we do have somewhat different goals and mandates given how our technologies are used, and domain knowledge is required. The talk also inspired me to finally sign up for TODO Group communication channels, which is a great thing.

On Monday afternoon I gave my talk on Linux Distribution Collaboration …on a Mainframe! which had an… interesting start. I was chatting with couple of folks who were familiar with older mainframe technology, and someone walked in and, in front of everyone in the room asked, “Is this a funny talk or an educational one?” when I responded “educational” they walked out. It was rather jarring, but thankfully everyone in the room was incredulous as I was at the question, so it turned out to be a little bonding moment. Still, yikes. I understand not wanting to waste your time by attending a you’d rather not be in, but there are more kind and tactful ways of determining that. Thankfully, the talk itself went well (slides here), the audience was engaging and asked great questions, and it was fun to chat with folks after the talk, and even after the conference!

The next talk I went to was in a similar vein to mine, exploring the landscape of and porting open source projects to another hardware architecture. In this case it was a talk from my old friend Michael Hall who now works for Arm. They have an Arm developer program that I’ll have to take a look at, especially since they have lots of tiny devices that are fascinating and I want to buy a whole box full, haha! Since the Raspberry Pi is Arm, I actually have a couple in-use, one sits on my desk.

That evening we congregated at the nearby Crank Arm Brewing before I returned to the hotel for the Speaker & Sponsor dinner. These sorts of social events are always where my social awkwardness is showcased, but at dinner I sat with some kind people. Hopefully I didn’t talk too much about typewriters and trains.

Tuesday morning I sadly missed the keynotes because I had to head over to the IBM office for a couple hours to meet with some folks and do a recording, but by mid-day I was back at the conference to staff the Presto booth with some of my fellow IBMers.

While doing booth things, I also had the pleasure of meeting the founder of AlmaLinux, who I’d actually been sitting with at the speaker dinner the night before, and spoke with, but hilariously we didn’t talk much about work, hah! It was particularly fun to see that they listed their supported platforms (architectures) on their banner, hooray for s390x on there! I knew it would be, since they’re part of our Linux Distributions Working Group, but it was still nice to see there in person, printed out for the world to see.

From there I went to one final session, and then settled in at a table where I met some new people while assembling my IBM z16 LEGO set. I brought the LEGO set on a bit of a whim, but it turned out to be quite the conversation starter! Which is good, because I am not.

The event concluded with a lovely closing keynote from Todd, but I was a bit peopled out at this point and decided to skip the final social at a bar and arcade in favor of a quiet dinner with an old friend and an early evening back to my room.

In all, it was an amazing event. I did hallway track more than sessions, which is unusual for me, but there were so many people I wanted to meet or catch up with, that I found my time was better spent with people this time around.

I will spend some time on the All Things Open YouTube account once the sessions that were recorded are uploaded. Many thanks to all the organizers and volunteers who make this exceptional event happen every year, I was so glad to be back!

I moved to California just a few months later, during one of the snowiest winters Philadelphia had seen in years. I was aware of CPOSC continuing over the years, but I could never sync up my visits back with the conference. This year serendipity stepped in. I just happened to discover via a chat in #plug a week and a half prior that CPOSC was happening during our visit to Philadelphia. Even better, they were still accepting applications for lightning talks. I swiftly submitted something (which was accepted!) and started making arrangements to attend. It was on a Saturday, but thankfully MJ had a friend in town who wanted time with the boys, so it wasn’t a big deal for me to sneak out for a day.

Friday night I attended a musical with some friends downtown, stayed the night in a hotel in Philadelphia, and then was up bright and early the next morning to catch my Amtrak train to Lancaster, where CPOSC was now based. Unfortunately it was a little rainy that day, so I got a little damp on my walk to the station, and then had to take an Uber from the station in Lancaster to the venue, but it all worked out. I was at CPOSC in time to catch the tail end of the provided breakfast refreshments and to say hello to some friends before the opening remarks.

The first talk was on “MAME – The Future of the Past (Open-Source Retro Computing and Gaming Emulation)” by Gregory Ember. This was one of my favorite talks of the event. While I may not have a lot of time for games these days, I do love them, and I really love geeking out about retro emulation tech. His talk gave a bit of a history of the project, which provided glimpses into some of the fascinating problems they’ve encountered and overcome. Fortuitously, he made an off-hand comment about mainframes, which gave me an opening to chat with him later and we were able to connect on social media post-event. Cool! I’m totally going to carve out some time to play with MAME.

Then I joined a packed room for a talk by my friend Walt Mankowski on “Remedial Math for Programmers” which I remember cheering him on for when he submitted his talk. In my case, about half the “remedial math” he was talking about was stuff I never actually learned because I didn’t go to school for computer science (I didn’t go to college or university at all). So it was a refresher for a few things, but some of the concepts were entirely new to me. I loved his style of presenting it with examples though, since it made it so much easier for me to understand.

The final talk before lunch was from Deanna Bledsoe on “8-Year-Olds are Learning to Code!” and she gave a great tour of the landscape today for younger folks learning how to code. I had been passingly familiar with Scratch and code.org, but it had been a while since I’d looked at any of it, and that was all before I became a parent. I didn’t really need an excuse to strike up a conversation with her, so it was a real delight when I saw her in the hallway later and we were able to talk about our shared interest in getting kids into STEM for a few minutes. I also used my time in the “hallway track” to chime into a conversation about package management, which folks came and went from and then ended up talking about amateur radio. It was during this discussion that I remembered what I missed so much about in-person conferences: those random, geeky personal connections. I’m shy, and half the people I was talking to I’d just met, but in that moment we were all just geeking out over topics we either had expertise or interest in. It’s so nice to be back to doing events. Just prior all that, I attended a talk by Tom Swartz on “Open Source Home Automation” where he focused on Home Assistant, and I was really glad to hear (and see!) that they’ve made some really great advances in the past couple years, it may be time for me to play around with it again.

If I had to say there was a them to my afternoon, it was AI. The first talk after lunch was “An AI Wrote This Talk” by Tom Swartz and it was an incredibly entertaining romp through the power, and shortcomings of ChatGPT and other LLM technologies out there, for now. We still need human intervention to truly make something engaging that connects to people, but how far are we away from a world where it’s not? This dovetailed nicely with the final talk of the day, from Richard Everts, on “What is Really Happening Right Now With AI”. Want to be scared a bit? I joked that it wouldn’t be an open source conference without a scary AI talk, and while he did have some bright spots, the general tone of the talk was a bit dystopian. There are some real concerns out there about the rapid progression of machine learning technologies. We may not have to worry about robots for a while, but deep fakes are already altering our perception of the world, and there really is no closing Pandora’s Box. In more localized concerns, routine programming tasks may be very well suited to AI, so our expertise in the technology realm may be going up a rung on the ladder. But I thought about this a lot on my train ride home, hasn’t this always been the case? As our tools and hardware advance, so do we. None of us are swapping out vacuum tubes or writing code for punched cards anymore. Plus, with every advance in technology, we’re able to do so much more! The folks breaking codes with early computers in WWII couldn’t dream of what would be happening in the world of computing just half a century later, let alone now. When we free up the humans from doing tedious tasks and offload that to computers, that allows us to focus on more interesting, complex problems. I wouldn’t say I’m an eternal optimist, but at the same time it’s nice for talks like this to knock some perspective into me every once in a while. Still, I’m going to cling to the positive in this case, because doing otherwise leads to a dark future that I’d struggle to live with.

The last part of the actual conference was the round of lightning talks, it was my time to hop up on stage! Admittedly, I’d been talking about mainframes to anyone who would listen all day, but the big stage was a nice chance to get spiel out to everyone who stayed long enough for them. Plus, I got to use a few moments of my talk time to gush about coming back to CPOSC after over a decade.

Sadly, I had to rush out as soon as I finished my talk, since I had a train to catch back to Philadelphia. I lucked out on timing though, since it started drizzling just as I got to the station, and the thunderstorm began while I was standing on the platform waiting for the train.

The thunderstorm really picked up steam while I was riding back, and it was glorious. I had a paper book in hand and listening to a storm while on a train is pure bliss. Unfortunately the storm also caused some power outages, which got us stuck for a bit in downtown Philadelphia, and so I was over an hour late coming into the next station, which should have been about 20 minutes from there. Plus, Uber had surge pricing due to lots of people being stuck in the rain, so my ride home from the station was quite a bit more pricey than I had anticipated. Still, I arrived back in time to scoop the boys out of the bath and help put them to bed. It was a long day, but worth it.

It’ll be several months before my next generalist open source conference. The pandemic is not over, and I doubt my travel schedule will go back to what it was pre-pandemic any time soon. A lot has changed with the world and the work I do in the past three years.

April has been an exciting month. On April 5th, the IBM z16 was released. For those of you who aren’t aware, this is the IBM zSystems class of mainframes that I’ve been working on at IBM for the past three years. As a Developer Advocate, I’ve been able to spend a lot of time digging into the internals, learning about the implementation of DevOps practices and incorporation of Linux into environments, and so much more. I’ve also had the opportunity to work with dozens of open source projects in the Linux world as they get their software to run on the s390x architecture. This includes working with several Linux distributions, and most recently forming the Open Mainframe Project Linux Distributions Working Group with openSUSE’s Sarah Julia Kriesch.

As a result, I’m delighted to continue to spend a little time with Ubuntu!

For the Ubuntu 22.04 release, the team at Canonical has already been working hard to incorporate key features of the IBM z16, which Frank Heimes has gone into detail about on a technical level on the Ubuntu on Big Iron Blog, IBM z16 launches with Ubuntu 22.04 (beta) support, and also over on Ubuntu.com with IBM z16 is here, and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS beta is ready. Finally, Frank published: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS got released

Indeed, timing was fortuitous, as Frank notes:

“Since the development of the new IBM z16 happened in parallel with the development of the upcoming Ubuntu Server release, Canonical was able to ensure that Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS (beta) already includes support for new IBM z16 capabilities.

And this is not limited to the support for the core system, but also includes its peripherals and special facilities”

Now that it’s release day, I wanted to celebrate with the community by sharing a few details of the IBM z16 and some highlights from those blog posts.

So first – the IBM z16 is so pretty! It comes in one to four frames, depending on the needs of the client. Inside the maximum configuration it has up to 200 Processor Units, featuring 5.2Ghz IBM Telum Processors, 40 TB of memory, and 85 LPARs.

As for how Ubuntu was able to leverage improvements to 22.04 to take advantage of everything from the AI Accelerator on the IBM Telum processor to new Quantum-Safe technologies, Frank goes on to share:

“Since we constantly improve Ubuntu, 22.04 was updated and modified for IBM z16 and other platforms in the following areas:

• virtually the entire cryptography stack was updated, due to the switch to openssl 3
• some Quantum-safe options are available: library for quantum-safe cryptographic algorithms (liboqs), post-quantum encryption and signing tool (codecrypt), implementation of public-key encryption scheme NTRUEncrypt (libntru)
• Secure Execution got refined and the virtualization stack updated
• the chacha20 in-kernel stream cipher (RFC 7539) was hardware optimized using SIMD
• the kernel zcrypt device driver is now able to exploit the new IBM zSystems crypto hardware, especially Crypto Express8S (CEX8S)
• and finally a brand new protected key crypto library package (libzpc) was added

This is a really interesting time to be a Linux distribution in this ecosystem. Beyond these fantastic strides made with Ubuntu, the collaboration that’s already taking place across distributions in our new Working Group has been exciting to watch.

Keep up the good work, everyone! And Ubuntu friends, pause a bit today to celebrate, you’ve earned it.

Jellyfish earrings!

Side note: I haven’t mentioned the IBM LinuxONE. As some background, the IBM z16 can have Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) processors, so you can already run Linux on this generation of mainframes! But the LinuxONE product line only has IFLs, meaning they exclusively run Linux. As a separate product, it can have different release dates, and the current timeline that’s been published is “second half of 2022” for the announcement of the next LinuxONE. Stay tuned, and know that everything I’ve shared about Ubuntu 22.04 for the IBM z16 will also be true of the next LinuxONE.

I had a couple days off around Christmas and New Years, so I spent one of those evenings with MJ de-soldering the SLT card I have. There’s still more work to be done on it, since the cards appear to have been assembled by hand and in addition to the solder, I have 50 year old bent wire to wrangle to get all the little the resistors out.

It was fun getting some new toys (de-soldering tool!) and working on a project together. So much of our lives revolve around the kids and the house, the ability carving out some hobby time together right now is rare. I managed to snag a couple more SLT cards from Etsy this week, along with some lamps from the IBM s/360 that I’ll work to incorporate into jewelry once we get our soldering iron (ordered! But supply chain issues…).

I spent a lot of time with the kids too. I’m definitely struggling to balance how much time I spend on the floor playing with them, and the time I spend on chores during the day. They’re aged one and three, and I know this time won’t last forever, but I’m definitely getting burnt out by pushing all chores to after they go to bed. Doing dishes, folding laundry, and other chores can be done while keeping an eye on the boys and I also know how important it is that they grow up knowing that chores get done, and sometimes helping with them.

Still, a strong focus on time with the boys meant that Adam and I could make a gingerbread house together!

And do some art!

And jump in puddles!

And make muffins!

And play with the train!

We also had a rough few days with baby Aaron as he worked his way through a reaction to his Measles vaccines. Due to the pandemic-driven isolation, neither of the boys have gotten sick lately. Aaron hasn’t had so much as a cold. I forgot how hard it is to watch your little one struggle, and how exhausting it is when it interrupts their sleep and a fever puts them in a bad mood. Still, he’s generally a cheerful boy, and that personality is always dominant, even when he’s a little grumpy for a few days.

He does mostly sleep through the night now, which was a whole struggle this year. The wake-ups he does have don’t require us to go in, and he solidly wakes up around 6AM, in spite of our attempts to shift this later by adjusting his bed time. I don’t love this development, Adam always slept until 7AM once he settled into a routine, and I do not enjoy mornings. Still, everything I’ve read says that 6AM is fair game for little ones, and I just need to focus on getting to sleep by 10PM.

Right before New Years I went for a long walk with a friend. It’s something I hadn’t done in almost two years because of the pandemic, but I realized that I could really use the company outside of our household. It did cause some self-reflection on how much trauma we’ve all had these past couple years. Before the walk I was worried a bit that I’d unload a lot of feelings onto this friend that had been pent up for a couple years and look like a total mess. It may have happened, but it was OK. I think we’re all in a similar place, especially those of us who were particularly cooped up with small children, as much as we love them.

But I already had a z15, so I wasn’t going to use this STL myself. Or was I? I clearly now needed a LinuxONE!

A colleague (thanks Joris!) hollowed out the STL to make it cheaper to print, and I removed the Z. Voila! I had a LinuxONE file to send off to get printed.

In the future, I may try to get it printed in the color I actually want, but I went for a quick quote and cheapest printing option that made sense from Xometry. I also used their tool to shrink it a little so it was the same size as my z15.

(As an aside, I’d love to own a 3D printer some day, but they’re expensive and require maintenance and all kinds of things I don’t currently have time or space for. Maybe some day!)

Since it came in white, I had to spray paint it just like the first (see my previous post for paint details).

Then I had to put down a coat of white in the inset areas, since the orange paint wouldn’t show up well on the black.

I went with the Orange Golden Artist Colors acrylic paint, the same brand and type I used with the z15.

The orange ended up being quite a bit brighter than the real LinuxONE, but I’m OK with that. I’m using it in a lot of photos and social media, so it’s fun that it’s more visible. That said, the “LinuxONE” and “IBM” text was the trickiest part about this model. When I shrunk the design, the IBM logo got a bit too small, and I didn’t have anything for LinuxONE. Ultimately, both spots were too small for proper logos, so I kinda just winged it with “IBM” and just drew a couple of lines to represent the spot where the LinuxONE branding should go.

It turns out OK! I still need more practice on miniature painting, but it’s not meant to be a perfect model, it’s just a bit of fun.

So I had a bit of fun, first with some cloud and Linux photo shoots!

And one with the System/360 bannerhead I have (grandpa!)

And finally, in action. I “brought” them along to the recent IBM Z Day we hosted, and included them in the pictures I took during the event.

Want to join in the fun? Grab the STL file and print your own!

“Dad, I’m chatting with someone in Sweden RIGHT NOW.”

As a teenager, it was my job to think everything my parents did was, at best, out-dated and irrelevant. I largely ignored the dirty old radio equipment that was piled in our garage, and I never actually saw my father operate. My mother doesn’t believe he ever had a license, and I never managed to find him in the dozens of historical call sign directories I looked at, but it easily could have been one of those hobbies from his 20s that he did with some buddies.

A few years later I was living in Philadelphia and had started using Linux. The overlap in Linux and amateur radio at the time was extensive, and I quickly learned that a lot of my techie friends were in to both. Part of it comes from the hacker, tinker culture that lead my friends to get into electrical engineering, but Linux actually enables you to use amateur radio is novel ways, so it’s all linked. Ultimately, getting my license ended up on my bucket list, as a way to connect with my deceased father, and because it looked interesting and fun. A few years later, I married MJ, who has had his amateur radio license since he was a teenager.

But many things in life are interesting and fun! So while I’d visit Philadelphia every year and attend FOSSCON, where my friends would ask “gonna take the test this year?” I’d just laugh and say, “maybe next year!” I did still want it, but it never became a priority, until 2020.

2020. That Year. First, we were living through the fourth year of the worst presidency of my life. I still feel like I was living in some weird reality that made a cartoonish rich guy from the 1980s into the 45th president of the United States. As a wealthy white woman, I was pretty immune to his policies, but my family is Jewish, and his policies directly hurt my loved ones. I watched people move out of the country due to legitimate fear for their lives and livelihood. I had colleagues in the industry who were separated from their families due to random changes in Visa policies. Hate crimes rose, and misinformation online flourished. Then the pandemic hit and federal response was reckless. Then we had the worst fire season in California history. When we woke up to orange skies here in the bay area on September 9, 2020, many of us were at a low point.

What does this have to do with amateur radio? Civilization is fragile. As we lived through rolling blackouts and bare shelves at grocery stores, it struck me how quickly our intricate web of things we use every day can collapse and leave us helpless. For some people this meant stocking up on toilet paper and buying more guns. For me this meant learning how electricity works and how to communicate simply over radio waves.

Practical things aside, getting my license was a clearly-defined accomplishment that I knew I’d enjoy, and it was something that is very me. Over the past three years, so much of what I’ve learned outside of work has been in the care of my home and children. It’s easy to lose yourself when you have kids, and I’ve definitely been struggling with that. Plus, for brief moments around discussing sleep schedules, discipline strategies, and meals for the kids, MJ could help me study or answer basic questions about electricity and operating procedures. It’s been nice to spend a little time being just our nerdy selves again.

Finally, with the pandemic, many clubs have started doing tests virtually. You join a video call, share your ID to prove you are who you say you are, show off your room to prove you’re not hiding the answers anywhere, and then share your screen as they watch you take the test. This was major for me. No need for me to go to an event or anything, I could take my test, and moments later scoop up my toddler and be back to mom mode! Parents, this is a great opportunity.

As for studying, I had a bit of fun with that too. In addition to MJ helping me out, I did a lot of studying on my own. First, I bought a paper copy of the No Nonsense Technician Class License Study Guide by Dan Romanchik. He gives the PDF away for free but having a disconnected way to start my studying was very helpful for me. Then, I got the Mometrix Ham Radio Technician License Exam Flashcard Study System. I set the giant pile of cards just outside the laundry room, and every time I walked by (A LOT!) I would pick up a few cards and run through them. Genuine mom hack right there. Finally, I used HamStudy.org extensively, especially in the final month before my test. Between desktop version and a few minutes here and there on my phone, the app was how I finally got good at passing the practice exams.

And since I don’t like being on the phone all the time with the kids, I would also sometimes use the cards when I was playing with them, with varying results. Sometimes I’d return to a bit of a mess!

In learning about schematics, I also got to spend a little time on “toddler art” that had us using some stencils, so I got to make batteries and resistors, and my toddler made some circles and squares. This beauty now hangs on the door to my home office.

I also took a bit of a side trip down phonetic alphabet lane. I never learned the proper civilian phonetic alphabet, and while you’re not tested on it, the use is encouraged in amateur radio. So I was shopping for a poster for Adam to learn the alphabet, and I realized I could learn too! I ended up buying a design that had large, clear letters for Adam, with small print phonetic alphabet, and Morse Code dots and dashes for good measure. I got it printed and laminated at a local print shop, and voila! We could now learn together! It’s actually working, just by having that poster around and glancing at it every day, I have most of the alphabet down.

The last thing I did to conclude this adventure to get my license was to sign up for my exam. With two little kids at home, it was incredibly easy to keep putting off studying and learning everything. Every day I’m too tired, too busy, just need a little more rest, 20 more minutes of TV. A date on the calendar really made me focus and prepare. It worked! On August 26th, I logged onto a video call with my pals from the Philly club and had the test administered. I passed with 34/35 correct!

The next day I got an email from the FCC with my call sign. I’m KN6QGG!

And MJ got me a cake!

Many thanks to my Philly crew who never gave up on me and nagged me year after year to get my license, especially Jim Fisher (AJ3DI) who has been with me on the whole journey. He gave me tips and nudges as I needed them.

I am happy with how this all went. If I were to do it again and had more time, I would have broken out my Discover Electronics Kit because I think some more hands on electronics fiddling would have been more fun and helped me understand the basic concepts more quickly. But hey, I still have the kit, so I can tackle that at another time!

Next is actually operating. I haven’t thought a whole lot about what I want to do, mostly because I am still in this early parenthood haze where I have very little time, but the first step will be getting a radio. I’ve already had a local acquaintance offer to give me a spare he has, we just need to figure out a time when we’re both free and I can pick it up! I’m sure I’ll find something delightful and clever to do with it.

And some day, while my sons are exploring some super cool virtual reality world with their pals on the Mars colony, I’ll tell them about amateur radio so they can roll their eyes at me.

Hopefully they’ll eventually come around.