I've just got back from Linaro Connect Asia 2013 in Hong Kong. This was my first time back in Hong Kong since 1995 when I left after living there for 10 years. It was really interesting to see how much the place had changed, as well as how much it hadn't!

I started the week by giving a talk together with Stefano Stabellini Introducing Xen on ARM to a full house. The slides can be found on the event page or google docs. There is a video on youtube but due to the cameras being setup for a fish-bowl style panel it is unfortunately mostly of my backside. The reception was excellent and the talk seeded a large number of hallway track conversations with all the many folks who are interested in Xen on the ARM platform.

The day after our talk Lars Kurth (Xen.org community manager) and Mark Heath (VP of XenServer Engineering, and my boss) gave a keynote (video) announced Citrix's intention to join the Linaro Enterprise Group (AKA "LEG") on the 1st of April. This is pretty exciting for me since it means I'll get to work much more closely with the Linaro and ARM communities and spend even more of my time hacking on Xen on ARM!

At some point Stefano and myself were also video interviewed by Charbax of http://armdevices.net/ but it doesn't appear to have gone online yet. Lars and Mark also gave interviews which are online already.

One nice thing about Connect is that the afternoons are left free of talks so I managed to find time in the hackrooms to implement SMP host support and 64-bit domain 0 support for Xen on ARM as well as getting multiarch cross building working for upstream Xen with Wookey's kind assistance (no patches for this yet since I still need to clean them up). It was also useful to catch up with the ARM kernel developers and KVM guys to see what they are up to and share ideas etc.

Finally right at the end Stefano and myself showed Xen on ARM at Demo Friday. We had Xen running on the Arndale Board, ARM Chromebook and 64-bit ARMv8 using the emulators (no hardware being available yet).

All in all I had an excellent (if tiring) week, there was loads of interest in Xen on ARM and in Citrix joining LEG and everyone was very welcoming. I'm really looking forward to the next Connect in Dublin.

Outside of Connect I managed to find time to visit Sham Shui Po at look at all the gadgets but managed to resist buying anything (Stefano got a Thinkpad X230, which was enough retail therapy for both of us!). I caught up with my sister (who lives there again), her boyfriend and my parents (who happened to be visiting her that week). I also managed have some drinks with some old school friends, most of whom I've not seen for nearly twenty years, but it was just like old times ;-).

I'm off again to Hong Kong next week with my family to visit my sister (yes, there was some bad planning involved here...). This time I plan to do all the toursity type stuff that I never did while I lived there. I've also got tickets for the Hong Kong Rubgy Sevens and hopefully I'll manage catch up with some more old friends. I probably won't be able to resist buying gadgets this time around though.