The Invisible Architecture: From Kernel Patches to Global AI (Other)

• Rex Tsai

Room: RB105 In 2004, Ubuntu captured the tech world's imagination as the "friendly Linux" desktop, simplifying computing for a generation of students and developers. Fast forward to 2026, and the landscape has fundamentally transformed. Ubuntu has evolved into the "Invisible Architecture" quietly driving the world's compute—powering public clouds, enterprise Kubernetes, autonomous vehicles, and global AI infrastructure. This session offers a 15-year engineering perspective on how Canonical scaled its operations from upstream Linux packaging to engineering massive delivery pipelines, managing 10-year LTS security cycles, and establishing FIPS-compliant environments. We will address a critical bottleneck in the modern ecosystem: the "AI Tax"—the immense friction developers face when battling mismatched CUDA versions, kernel headers, and broken NPU drivers instead of building models. We will explore how Canonical collaborates with silicon partners like NVIDIA (GB10/GB300) and AMD to eliminate this complexity, ensuring the hardware is fully optimized right out of the box. Additionally, the session introduces "Inference Snaps" as the modern unit of truth for AI deployment. We will examine how Snaps bring immutability, reproducibility, and sandboxed security to a "black box" AI world, serving as a trusted "glass box" across thousands of edge nodes. Finally, we will close with a call to action for the open-source community, highlighting how the growing local ecosystem can ensure that the future of AI remains decentralized, trusted, and open.

Creating containers like Michelangelo (Security and Compliance)

• Tushar Gupta

Room: AU AI has had an interesting side effect: it has shifted security from something often treated as an afterthought into a proactive, first-class concern in modern software development. With LLMs, scanning and identifying attack vectors is no longer limited to the codebase; it now extends across transitive dependencies, third-party packages, and entire distributions, resulting in a steady stream of newly uncovered critical CVEs. Containers sit at the core of modern service deployments. Securing them is critical, and one of the most effective ways to strengthen security is to reduce the attack surface by stripping away everything that isn't essential. The challenge is doing that in a reliable, efficient and repeatable way. Luckily, there's a tool built for exactly this: Rocks. It's an OCI-compliant image builder that lets you chisel away unnecessary packages and dependencies, helping you sculpt a lean, purpose-built container image, much like Michelangelo revealing a masterpiece from a block of "rock". (pun intended)

From Big Data to ML: Integrating Spark and Kubeflow with Juju (Data, AI and ML)

• Bikalpa Dhakal (Canonical)

Room: AU In modern data science, the "Data Lakehouse" is a powerful way to manage large-scale data. However, for many teams, the "last mile" of integration—connecting Machine Learning platforms like Kubeflow to big data processing engines like Apache Spark—remains a major technical challenge. In a shared Kubernetes cluster, managing security, user permissions, and connection strings across different user profiles often leads to manual errors and security risks. In this session, we will explore an open-source solution to this problem using Juju and Charmed Operators. We will walk through a "Multi-Integrator" architecture where each Kubeflow profile receives its own secure connection to the data platform. Instead of manual configuration, we use automated integrators to inject Spark Service Accounts, configurations, and security secrets directly into user namespaces. By using Charmed Spark and Charmed Kubeflow, we can create a modular system where data scientists can move from a simple notebook to a distributed Spark job without worrying about the underlying YAML files or credentials. We will discuss the logic of this design, how it handles multi-tenancy, and how it simplifies the path to a production-ready data lakehouse on Ubuntu.

Invisible Debugging for Docker Workloads on Ubuntu GCP: eBPF in Action (Cloud and Infrastructure)

• Rajani Ekunde (Senior Software Engineer)

Room: AU Modern production systems often restrict SSH access, making traditional debugging on Ubuntu instances increasingly difficult. In this talk, I share real-world SRE experiences debugging live issues on Ubuntu virtual machines running on GCP, without logging into them. Using eBPF-based tools on Ubuntu, I demonstrate how to trace system calls, analyze network behavior, and identify performance bottlenecks in real time. Through actual incident scenarios, we’ll uncover how Ubuntu’s kernel capabilities combined with eBPF enable “invisible debugging,” helping engineers resolve critical issues faster without disrupting production systems.

Zero-Trust Workloads with Confidential Containers on Ubuntu (Security and Compliance)

• Vutukuri Sreenivas (Jenkins)

Room: TR211 In terms of protecting sensitive data during execution across diverse cloud environments, typical **container isolation** mechanisms frequently fall short. While traditional security secures data at rest and in transit, the **"data-in-use"** gap remains leaving memory and running processes vulnerable to a compromised host, hypervisor, or rogue administrator. Without requiring changes to application code, Confidential Containers (CoCo) is a potent open-source technology that makes it possible to isolate workloads safely and effectively using hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). This session examines how memory encryption, remote attestation, and hardware-level isolation offered by CoCo might improve zero-trust security on Ubuntu systems. Measures like standard Linux namespaces and cgroups are less efficient against contemporary infrastructure-level attacks as a result of the sophistication of modern cloud-native threats. By offering a cryptographic method of isolating system memory without compromising cloud flexibility, CoCo tackles these issues. And CoCo is a crucial tool for contemporary data privacy and compliance since it can protect proprietary code, AI models, and sensitive payloads by executing them inside hardware-attested utility VMs on the Linux kernel. The talk will focus on the integration of **Confidential Containers with Ubuntu**, highlighting Canonical’s and the broader open-source community's ecosystem support for TEE-backed virtualization such as Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP. Will also include **practical demonstrations** of CoCo deployments on Ubuntu, showcasing how to use the open-source CoCo Operator for running encrypted pods, managing remote attestation, and preventing unauthorized host-level access to container memory. We will walk through real-world examples of deploying hardware-isolated workloads using CNCF tools such as Kata Containers and the Confidential Containers project alongside Ubuntu's MicroK8s, demonstrating how they enforce a true zero-trust architecture in modern cloud infrastructures. Participants will have a thorough grasp of how to use Confidential Containers to improve data-in-use security in Ubuntu environments by the end of this session. They will acquire hands-on experience in deploying CoCo for memory encryption, hardware-based workload isolation, and cryptographic attestation, allowing them to leverage this potent technology in their own infrastructure strategies and actively champion advanced cloud security within the Ubuntu ecosystem.

Ubuntu Circles BoF (Community)

• Youngbin Han (Ubuntu Korea Community)
• Sailesh Singh (GNOME Nepal, Ubuntu Nepal)

Room: TR310-2 Interested in running your own Local Ubuntu community (which is called Ubuntu Circles)? Or would like to connect with folks who run Ubuntu Circles in their city? Join this BoF to learn what is it and how to start your own and practices from other Ubuntu Circles leaders.

Implementing immutability & atomicity within desktop Linux (Desktop and WSL)

• Rudra Saraswat (Ubuntu Member and Project Lead of blendOS & Ubuntu Unity)

Room: TR211 *This is an advancement on a presentation I had previously delivered with regards to atomic Linux distributions found [here](https://events.canonical.com/event/89/contributions/459/).* Over the past couple of years, immutable & atomic Linux distributions have made significant strides in day-to-day usability and practicality; yet, there remains comparatively little in the way of low-level explanations with regards to how these mechanisms are implemented under-the-hood, in spite of the extent to which such attributes are desired on other, existing distributions. The intention of this presentation, then, is to demonstrate one such implementation of atomicity within a desktop Linux distribution I maintain - blendOS - and explore how we went about implementing support for varying distribution bases (among them Ubuntu), alongside how one may develop such an implementation for their own distributions, in an attempt to ease existing systems into such a paradigm.

Local Real-Time Subtitles on Ubuntu with Moonshine and Pympress (Desktop and WSL)

• Mitsuya Shibata

Room: TR211 Language barriers remain a significant challenge in international conferences. Not all speakers are fluent in English, and even when they are, their speech may not always be easy for diverse audiences to understand. While some events provide professional captioning or simultaneous interpretation, such services are not always available for every session. In this talk, I will present a self-contained approach that enables speakers to generate real-time subtitles directly from their own laptop. By combining [Moonshine Voice](https://github.com/moonshine-ai/moonshine), a lightweight and efficient speech-to-text (STT) system that can run even on devices like Raspberry Pi, with [Pympress](https://github.com/Cimbali/pympress), a PDF-based presentation tool, we can build a fully local, automatic subtitle system on Ubuntu. This approach allows speakers to make their talks more accessible without relying on external infrastructure or services, making it easier to participate in international events regardless of location or available resources.

Bringing AI to RISC-V: From Edge Devices to Developer-Ready Systems (Data, AI and ML)

• Yuning Liang (DeepComputing)
• Martin Chang

Room: TR211 As AI workloads continue to expand beyond the cloud, developers are increasingly looking for open, efficient, and flexible platforms to run models at the edge and on personal devices. RISC-V, as an open instruction set architecture, is emerging as a promising foundation for this shift. In this session, Martin will share practical engineering experiences from building AI-capable RISC-V systems — covering key areas such as CPU–accelerator integration, software stack enablement, and optimization for real-world workloads. The talk will explore how Linux-based environments can support AI development on RISC-V today, what challenges remain across toolchains and runtimes, and how upstream collaboration is helping accelerate ecosystem maturity.