FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event organised by the community for the community. The full form is Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting, you can learn more about it’s history here.

My day to day involves working with Linux, and maintaining a Linux Distribution for my company and building new features for the distribution. FOSDEM is great conference for Linux builders and even users to learn about the latest greatest happening in the community.

I curated a list of talks that I think are relevant to any builder or system administrator, working with Linux, especially for folks working in a similar problem space, as I am.

Talks

systemd keynote

  1. 14 Years of systemd

Linux distribution engineering

  1. Boot from network attached devices using mkosi-initrd (or why systemd distributions should really start considering mkosi-initrd)
  2. Fedora Silverblue With Disk Encryption: How I Almost Lost Everything But Gained Much Wisdom (Side Story: Bmaptool And Ddrescue: Why One Should Never Ever Use Dd)
  3. Rhino Linux and Pacstall: Towards a Rolling Ubuntu
  4. Building the Future: Understanding and Contributing to Immutable Linux Distributions
  5. Exploring Open Source Dual A/B Update Solutions for Embedded Linux

Image-based Linux and Boot security

systemd & TPM in 2025Lennart Poettering09:0009:30
ParticleOS: Can we make Lennart Poettering run an image based distribution?!Daan De Meyer09:3010:00
FDE is almost there, how do we tackle the last hurdles?Richard Brown10:0010:30
“Signed, Sealed, and Delivered”, with UKIs and composefsTimothée Ravier, Allison Karlitskaya10:3011:00
Lessons learned from deploying boot security features on embedded systemsValentin Geffroy, Johann Gautier11:0011:30
Generating immutable, A/B updatable, securely booting Debian imagesJan Kiszka11:3012:00
Bootable Containers and Image Mode: Transforming Linux OS Management with BootcEric Curtin, Pierre-Yves Chibon12:0012:30
Case Study: Measured Boot and Remote Attestation in Confidential Containers

OS proper

  1. Rust for Linux
  2. Rewriting the future of the Linux essential packages in Rust ?
  3. How to push your testing upstream
  4. Enabling Architectural Features in Debian: PAC and BTI on arm64
  5. Redox OS – a Microkernel-based Unix-like OS
  6. Rust for Linux: an overview
  7. Multi-Profile UKIs and other ways to supercharge your Unified Kernel Images

Endpoint Cloud, and Linux security

  1. Remote Attestation in the cloud
  2. Remote Attestation on Arm TrustZone OP-TEE with VERAISON Verifier — current status and future plan —
  3. Measurement and Attestation Schemes for Container Sandboxes
  4. Recent TPM Security Enhancements to the Linux Kernel
  5. Hardware backed SSH keys: ssh-tpm-agent
  6. A retrospective on Google’s SBOM implementation

Container technology

  1. Running Containers Under Systemd: Exploring Podman Quadlet
  2. Immutable All the Way Down - using System Extensions to ship Kubernetes

Low level systems AI/ML

  1. The Local AI Rebellion
  2. Hugging Face ecosystem for Local AI/ ML
  3. History and advances of quantization in llama.cpp
  4. Building Your (Local) LLM Second Brain
  5. Building AI Applications from your desktop with Podman AI Lab
  6. Self-hosted LLMs at a scale with Paddler

Testing and Infrastructure

  1. Streamlining package testing with Molecule and Jenkins
  2. KernelCI - upgrading Linux development and integration workflows
  3. Refining the Release Strategy of a Custom Linux Distro
  4. Running QEMU Inside Browser
  5. The IaC Tooling Multiverse and the Future of IaC

Python

  1. Create A Custom Linux Init in Python
  2. Anatomy of a Python OpenTelemetry instrumentation

Rust

  1. Rust-ifying the Linux kernel scheduler (in user space)
  2. Lessons from rewriting systems software in Rust
  3. Adventures in oxidizing Arch Linux Package Management