Bengaluru Systems Meetup #14

Meetup Recap: January Edition

Attendance We had a good turnout with 19 attendees, bringing together a mix of working professionals and students eager to connect with like-minded engineers. It was great to see an engaged group ready to dive deep into what they like!

What happened The session featured a deep dive into a fascinating benchmarking anomaly where a Go auction server surprisingly performed slower than a Python equivalent. The speaker, Prachi, revealed that the root cause wasn’t the code’s inefficiency, but rather its efficiency—it overwhelmed the kernel’s TCP stack, leading to buffer overflows. To solve this without blind guessing, the speaker demonstrated a custom eBPF tool she built. This tool attaches to kernel tracepoints to detect packet drops in real-time, pinpointing exactly which function and process ID are responsible. The talk concluded with a Q&A session where the audience explored the nuances of kernel debugging and the specific architecture of the tool.

With time in hand, there was also an impromptu session by Vinaayak where he introduced bootc, a tool that packages the entire Linux OS into a standard OCI container image. This approach moves Linux desktops toward an immutable architecture where system updates are as reliable as pulling a Docker image, bringing us closer to a secure and breakage-free desktop experience. The talk ended with “This is the year of Linux Desktops” in bold words.