Along with a great line up of keynote speakers and breakout sessions, LinuxCon and CloudOpen offer a dizzying array of workshops, mini-summits and work sessions this year. How will you make the most of your time in the Big Easy?

To learn more about each of the events on offer I spoke with a variety of projects and organizers about what attendees can expect.  Allow me to make your scheduling decisions a bit easier then with this two-part guide to co-located events. Most events are included with your LinuxCon and CloudOpen registration, though some ask you to RSVP or pay a small additional fee.

Part one covers the three Linux Foundation collaborative projects holding day-long events co-located with LinuxCon and CloudOpen on Sept. 16-18 in New Orleans: the Xen Project, OpenDaylight and Tizen. Next week I’ll run through the highlights of the Linux Plumbers Conference; Linux Wireless Summit; Linux Security Summit; UEFI Plug Fest; Enea Hacker Day; and the Gluster Workshop.

OpenDaylight Mini-Summit

Who should attend: Cloud people who want to understand more about SDN (software-defined networking) and what it can do for them.

“There is a need for a strong SDN foundation underneath OpenStack or CloudStack and OpenDaylight is specifically targeting to fill that need,” said Phil Robb, director of network solutions for OpenDaylight at The Linux Foundation.

What to expect:  Unlike the recent OpenDaylight hack fest, which was focused on turning out code for the project’s first major release, the mini summit is a high-level discussion intended to get the open cloud platforms and SDN folks working together.

The day has five sessions, including an introduction to the project; a walk through of the features expected in the first release; and a panel to talk about how SDN can connect virtual networks in a cloud environment. See the full list of sessions in this OpenDaylight blog post.

Don’t miss: Brent Salisbury, a network architect at the University of Kentucky. Unrelated to any company in OpenDaylight, he has chosen to create and drive a project for integrating open virtual switch (OVS) into OpenDaylight. He and one of the student leads on that project will speak about using OpenDaylight in production. Yes, even though it’s not released yet.

Tizen Mini-Summit

Who should attend: Anyone interested in learning more about Tizen or contributing to the project.

“We’re bringing this for people who aren’t just familiar with Tizen,” said Thiago Macieira, a software architect at Intel and Tizen platform community manager. “There’s a big audience that’s varied and we want to present what the project is and what it’s trying to do.”

What to expect: Some sessions will be more high level, while others will be technical and geared for developers. Engineers involved in the project will present an introductory architectural overview of Tizen and lead a discussion on Tizen 3.0 open governance. Other sessions will cover issues such as security, and areas targeted for improvement that are seeking contributors.

Don’t miss: Samsung senior manager and engineer Tasneem Brutch will talk about acceleration of web applications via openCL and how that relates to Tizen.

Xen Project User Summit

Who should attend: Everyone from Xen beginners to long-time Xen users.

“We are covering a lot of territory for a one-day conference, so there is no doubt in my mind that people will walk away with plenty of good information, regardless of their background,” said Russell Pavlicek, Xen Project Evangelist at Citrix.

What to expect: This is the first of two Xen Project events this year. The September summit in New Orleans will focus on the hypervisor’s users, while developers will be the focus of the LinuxCon Europe summit in Edinburgh in October.

Advisory board members CA Technologies, Calxeda and Citrix will all be involved in presentations, but all other sessions are from the user and wider Linux communities.  

“A few talks will touch on the future as well as the current state of things, so people will want to hear that as well,” Pavlicek said.

Don’t miss:Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux kernel stable branch, is giving an interesting talk on “how using kexec in a paravirtualized user domain, with no changes to the control Domain or Xen itself, can allow you to boot your own kernel, no matter what the hosting provider is forcing you to run,” according to the Xen Project blog post on the event.

Bryan Smith, also a regular OSCON speaker, will give the introductory talk on “Xen for Beginners.”