The 2025 edition of Capitole du Libre took place in Toulouse, France on November, 15th and 16th this year, and as in previous years, Bootlin was actively involved through a variety of contributions.
The Capitole du Libre is a major conference about Free Software in the south of France, even attracting people from other countries. This is an important opportunity for local actors to meet and share their interests and contributions to Open Source Software.
With Bootlin CEO Thomas Petazzoni being co-founder of Toulibre, the non-profit organization in charge of organizing Capitole du Libre, this makes this event a natural opportunity for Bootlin team to meet and connect back with the community. This year again, Bootlin has sponsored the event at the platinum level, the highest partnership tier available. The company also had its own booth showcasing its field of expertise through different hardware and software demos.
On the conference side, the Bootlin team has once again presented multiple talks:
- Thomas Petazzoni gave an overview of the major additions introduced in the Linux kernel since the last edition of the event. Being one of the biggest code base in the world, it is quite hard to follow all the changes frequently brought to the upstream kernel code base. This talk was an opportunity to highlight the outstanding changes, while using the opportunity to properly introduce the corresponding features
- on a lighter note, Alexis Lothoré has introduced a personal game project developed with some friends, showcasing how open-source software and tools were used in its creation.
This edition was also an opportunity for Bootlin to experiment with a new format: Bootlin engineers Maxime Chevallier and Alexis Lothoré have prepared and animated a workshop on the second day, on a longer time slot, aiming to make attendees more familiar with eBPF, a modern in-kernel technology highly used in networking infrastructure, monitoring, security and related topics. The workshop has involved a first introduction part, being a condensed excerpt of our Networking and Debugging trainings. Next, attendees have undertaken a guided implementation of a complete eBPF based “proof of concept”: an in-kernel ad-blocker ! The incremental process has allowed them to grasp the foundation of eBPF development, while slowly shaping a custom, complete tool with which they can experiment. The reader interested in reproducing this workshop on its own have of course access freely to the concept slides and the workshop instructions. One of the participants, Stéphane Bortzmeyer, famous enough to have his own Wikipedia entry, wrote an interesting blog post (in French) with his feedback on this workshop.
If you are near the south region of France and still hesitating about attending Capitole du Libre, we warmly invite you to give it a try, as there are high chances that you will enjoy it and make it an annual rendez-vous in your agenda!
