Talk – Aniruddha Basak

Hey there everyone! From the past couple of month I have been learning more about Operating Systems and Linux. And after that I started contributing to Flatcar linux. And On 10 August I gave my life’s first talk in the flatcar community call.

What is Flatcar Linux?

Flatcar Container Linux is a container optimized OS that ships a minimal OS image, which includes only the tools needed to run containers. The OS is shipped through an immutable filesystem and includes automatic atomic updates.

What is community call?

So every month the community organise a zoom meeting where they discuss about news, status updates of their various feature and also upcoming release plannings. Here you can see all the meetings that happened previously with their slides and also information of the upcoming calls. Also there is a spotlight section where I shared my experience of my first flatcar contribution and my journey that how I started.

What I did in my first contribution?

I actually worked on a project called locksmith. locksmith is a reboot manager for the Flatcar update engine which is able to use etcd to ensure that only a subset of a cluster of machines are rebooting at any given time. Also locksmithd runs as a daemon on Flatcar hosts and is responsible for controlling the reboot behaviour after updates.

I worked on a issue that was based on semaphore. The issue was mainly If no semaphore was acquired before then the locksmithd will reboot outside of the reboot window after an update. The expected behaviour was –

Try to get the semaphore in infinite loop.
If it fails but still in the reboot window then sleep for a certain interval.
If it fail but not in reboot window then sleep until the next window.
If it succeed then reboot.

How was my experience?

As it was my first talk I was a bit nervous about it. But I finally gathered the courage and gave the talk. After the talk I watched it later and found that the introduction part could have been improved a little bit.