paulmck

This is part of the Kernel Recipes 2025 blog series.

An earlier section expounded on the importance of building your bridge starting from where your target audience already is.  The previous section talked about using stories to build your bridge.

However, it is just as important to understand where your bridge’s destination lies.  This might seem blindingly obvious, but suppose that you were just invited to speak.  That is right, a conference is going to give you a precious 30 minutes in front of their audience.  But where do you want to take them?  Where do they need to go?

I cannot decide this for you.  Instead, you must decide, based on your experiences and those of the audience.

But I can list the destinations that I chose for the example talks from the previous section:

1. “What Happens When 4096 Cores All Do synchronize_rcu_expedited()?”: Demonstrate extreme scalability is possible, some techniques for scaling, and exposition of portions of Linux-kernel RCU.
2. “RCU's First-Ever CVE, and How I Lived to Tell the Tale”: Show that ease of use is important even for low-level synchronization primitives, “a year in the life of the RCU maintainer”.
3. “Bare-Metal Multicore Performance in a General-Purpose Operating System (Adventures in Ubiquity)”: Describe how extreme stress testing proves to not be all that extreme, introduction to RCU callback offloading and NOHZFULL, exposition of portions of Linux-kernel RCU.
4. “Cautionary Tales on Implementing the Software That People Want”: “My users don’t know what they want” is not a valid excuse and never has been, connection between validation and natural selection, hazards of refusing to fix irrelevant bugs (never mind that we all too often have no choice).

Of course, the fact that we choose a particular destination does not necessarily mean that the audience will arrive there!