Kernel Recipes 2025

Kernel Recipes is an amazing conference and it is unique in several different ways. First of all because it is community-oriented, and the environment is really open and friendly. And then because it has a single track – i.e. all the talks are in the same room – people don't need to choose which talks to attend: they'll attend all of them. Oh, and there was even a person (Anisse Astier) that was doing live blogging. How awesome is that?

This year I managed to attended this conference for the first time, in its usual place: in Paris, in the Cité Internationale campus.

All the sessions were recorded and the videos are available at the conference website so that people can (re)watch them. For this reason, in this post I am not going through all that talks I've watched, but I would like to mention a few of them that I personally (and very subjectively!) found more interesting.

The first two I'd like to mention are those from my Igalian friends, of course! Melissa Wen has done a talk named Kworkflow: Mix & Match Kernel Recipes End-to-end. This talk was about Kernel workflow, which is an interface that glues together a set of tools and scripts into a single unified interface. The other talk from Igalia was delivered by Maíra Canal, and was about the evolution of the Rust programming language usage within the DRM subsystem. Her talk was named A Rusty Odyssey: A Timeline of Rust in the DRM subsystem.

As expected, there were plenty of different areas covered by the talks, but the ones that I found most exciting were those related with memory management. And there were a few of them. The first one was from Lorenzo Stokes (the guy that wrote "the book"!). He delivered the talk Where does my memory come from?, explaining this "simple" thing: what exactly happens when an user-space application does malloc()?

The second talk related with memory management was from Matthew Wilcox, touching different aspects of how reclaiming memory from within the VFS (and in file systems in general) can be tricky. Unsurprisingly, the name of his talk was Filesystem & Memory Reclaim.

The last memory management related talk was from Vlastimil Babka, which talked about the contents of the /proc/vmstat file in a talk named Observing the memory mills running.

The last talk I'd like to mention was Alice Ryhl's So you want to write a driver in Rust? It's not that I'm a huge Rust enthusiast myself, or that I actually know how to program in Rust (I do not!). But it was a nice talk for someone looking for a good excuse to start looking into this programming language and maybe get the missing push to start learning it!

Finally, a Huge Thanks to the organisation (and all the sponsors, of course) as they definitely manage to keep a very high quality conference in such a friendly environment. Looking forward for Kernel Recipes 2026!