2026-09-24 –, 107 (Capacity 20)
Device Mapper is the invisible engine under your LVM volumes, your dm-crypt containers, your thin pools, and your multipath setup.
You quite likely use it every day. But do you know it?
This is the one where we open the bonnet: we'll cover dmsetup power moves — the low-level commands that let you inspect, manipulate, and sometimes terrify your storage stack in ways the higher-level tools don't expose.
We'll dive into dmstats, the criminally underused performance measurement framework that lets you track I/O at per-region, per-object granularity and actually answer the question "where is my storage bottleneck?" And we'll look at dmpy, a Python automation library that lets you drive all of this programmatically without shelling out to dmsetup like it's 2003.
The workshop will provide practical, useful, hands-on exercises that users can try out right away using provided VM images/KS files.
No prerequisites beyond basic system admin skills.
Neal Gompa is a developer for–and contributor to–Fedora, CentOS, AlmaLinux, and openSUSE. Neal focuses primarily on the base Linux system components, such as package and software management, and desktop Linux. He believes in “upstream first,” which has led him all over the open source world. In addition to open source work as a consultant through Velocity Limitless, he is also a co-host on the Sudo Show podcast where he talks about "the business of Linux."
Bryn M. Reeves is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat with 30 years of Linux experience. He is the maintainer of sos, boom, and snapm, and has worked extensively on device-mapper, LVM2, and Linux storage infrastructure. He implemented the DM/UDEV cookie synchronisation protocol natively in devicemapper-rs, and has the battle scars to prove it.
He is an experienced public speaker (and winner of multiple past DevConf "best talk" awards dating back more than a decade) with a long standing reputation for interesting, engaging (and humorous) demonstrations that present complex technical subjects in an accessible and friendly fashion.