Hosting the UXL Foundation Mini Summit at OSS Denver

I attended my second Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, my first being when we announced the formation of the UXL Foundation in Bilbao. The destination this time was Denver and the event did not disappoint.

The opening keynotes included a very relevant celebration, with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF) turning 10 years old. When we set up the UXL Foundation we decided to use the JDF template framework to establish our governance. The reason for this is that it provides a simple but effective way to go about defining standards, and in our case APIs. Without this framework we would have needed to involve many lawyers and organisations to bring together the paperwork to establish a standards body and open source foundation. Many of the existing members had already signed this type of template agreement so it made the participation very straightforward.

I was really happy to be part of this celebration, met Jory Burson who leads the JDF effort in real life, and am now the proud owner of a JDF hoodie.

Jory wrote about her experiences on how important standards are in the context of the open source community and Linux Foundation. She also held the Standards Forum at the Open Source Summit where there were some valuable insights and learnings.

We held our first UXL Foundation Mini Summit, I learned a lot from the open source community and I made some great new connections during the event. There were presentations from across our community and you can watch the recordings of these on the UXL Foundation Playlist. I was really pleased to host this event, and to engage directly with the audience. Let us know what you would like to see at the next UXL Foundation hosted event.

This was the first time we held a UXL Steering Committee meeting face to face and it was very productive to have people in the same room to talk about our progress in the first half of the year, and our plans for the second half of the year.

I talked a couple of weeks ago following my trip to ISC about how RISC-V has emerged as a popular choice for processor design, in particular CPUs but processors using the RVV are emerging and the compiler infrastructure in LLVM is beginning to mature. At ISC during the RISC-V Birds of a Feather session a figure was mentioned for the number of RISC-V cores that have been shipped and I saw this claim repeated at the Open Source Summit. Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin quoted over a billion RISC-V cores shipped, predominantly by NVIDIA who is now using RISC-V cores as part of their GPU designs. Whilst the era of mass volumes of RISC-V GPU like processors is not yet here, it does show the momentum behind the standard, and I have had many conversations about how the software toolchains and libraries can mature to meet the needs of the developer community. The UXL Foundation libraries can be a key component to enable the performance of these new processors, bringing a unified API and performance portability.

Please take a look at the recordings from our mini summit at Open Source Summit Denver and let us know what you would like to see at the next one.