Not a primer so much as a set of working exhibits: you get to click Next txg and watch the uberblock ring advance, then change the sector size and see the slot count fall. If you've ever explained pool import to a colleague with a whiteboard and some hand-waving, this is the whiteboard done properly.

Brooker makes the case for building animations to get an intuition for how systems fail, and picks a cracking example: one replica whose storage lies about fsync is enough for Raft to lose acknowledged writes. Anyone who has argued with a disk controller's write cache will nod along.

Day one was the AI-and-specs day; the back half is where the workshop gets back to its usual business of storage, failures and consensus. Note the session pointedly titled 'Hardware will save us all' and the GPU-database talk that concedes two of its three problems are being fixed by the roadmap and the third is engineering.

Nur flagged this one as really good, and it is: the view from userspace's heaviest customer, delivered by the person who keeps getting paged when the kernel moves under him. Note the fsyncgate scar tissue and the unexpectedly warm words about working with the io_uring side. Anyone who has been on the other end of an 'application regression' report will recognise both sides of this.

Paul McKenney's 1990 trick is one of those algorithms that looks too cheap to work: hash flows onto a fixed number of queues, rehash now and then, and noisy neighbours mostly stop hurting everyone else. Brooker walks through why the odds are so good and where it fits in modern multi-tenant services. Familiar from the qdisc side, worth seeing argued from first principles.

HPTS is the small, invitation-only workshop where the transaction-processing and storage crowd says what it really thinks, and Murat's trip reports are the next best thing to being there. The disk numbers from Dropbox are the bit to stop on: capacity has outrun bandwidth so far that reading a whole drive now takes about a day and a half.

An argument any kernel maintainer will recognise: the code that everything else depends on deserves the most patience, not the least. Zhang borrows from the slow food movement and ties effort to blast radius, which is a tidy way to say what reviewers have long felt. It is from July, but it has aged into exactly this moment.