Recap of the 18th China Linux Kernel Developers Conference (CLK 2023)

On October 28, 2023, the 18th China Linux Kernel Developers Conference (CLK 2023) was successfully held in Shenzhen, attracting nearly 500 developers from across the country. The event was livestreamed through multiple media and community platforms (CSDN, InfoQ, openEuler, etc.), accumulating more than 180,000 online viewers.

The conference was co‑organized by Tsinghua University, Intel, openEuler, Alibaba Cloud, Fujitsu, DiJie Software, Tencent Cloud, OPPO, ByteDance, Vivo, Ant Group, Loongson, and other enterprises, with the theme of “Freedom, Collaboration, Innovation”. It aimed to promote open‑source technologies and foster communication among Linux kernel enthusiasts.

Four keynote speakers presented in the morning main forum, followed by six experts in a round‑table discussion. The afternoon featured four sub‑forums covering Memory Management, Cloud & Server, Arch & Virtualization & I/O, and Debug/eBPF/Scheduling, offering both deep and broad technical insights.

Key presentations included:

Gu Jinxiang (Deputy Chair of the Conference Committee) and Prof. Li Zhijun (Harbin Institute of Technology) discussed Linux’s future trends, emphasizing customizable scheduling, AI‑driven kernel evolution, and the impact of digital society on operating‑system ecosystems.

Xu Minjia (GM, OPPO Platform Software Development Center) presented “Linux kernel optimizations for user‑experience improvement in ColorOS”, highlighting programmable CPU schedulers, memory management, and I/O scheduling.

Song Zhuo (Senior Technical Expert, Alibaba Cloud) shared “OS‑hardware co‑design and deep optimization for cloud scenarios”, based on ARMv9 processors and large‑scale deployment experiences.

Song Munchun (Linux Kernel Engineer, ByteDance) addressed scalability challenges in Linux memory management and scheduling, covering lock contention, memory usage, and multi‑core synchronization.

Yang Kaixian (Director of Underlying Software Technology, Vivo) explored “Practices and thoughts on developing the kernel with Rust”, discussing Rust’s features, current status in the Linux kernel, and future prospects.

The round‑table titled “How to unite industry forces and enhance the influence of China’s open‑source community” featured experts from openEuler, Tencent, Loongson, Intel, and Ant Group, providing constructive suggestions for both newcomers and seasoned kernel developers.

All session recordings and presentation slides are now available. The livestream URLs for the main forum and each sub‑forum are provided, along with a GitHub repository (https://github.com/ChinaLinuxKernel/CLK2023) containing the conference materials. The official conference website is http://ckernel.org/.

Organizers and mentors from various companies and institutions were thanked for their contributions, and the community is invited to look forward to next year’s event.