BSDCan Trip Report: Renato Botelho

The next trip report is from Renato Botelho. He writes:

I arrived Tuesday morning after a long trip with 2 more friends, Luiz Otavio O Souza and André Oliveira. While waiting the bus, we met John Hixson, from ixSystems. After checking into the Residence, I used the afternoon to walk a bit in the city. At the end of the afternoon I went to the Royal Oak and met Diane Bruce and other developers.

The first session Wednesday morning was about the security incident from last year. It was really nice to hear what happened and what has been done since then to improve security on the FreeBSD cluster. After that, it was time for Netflix and FreeBSD, by Scott Long. It was really interesting to hear what is happening with FreeBSD inside Netflix.

In the afternoon, I attended the Ports and Packages working group. There were a lot of topics about what is being and what needs to be done to improve ports. The hot topic was cross-building ports.

In the evening I attended the Vendor Summit. It was another interesting series of discussions as there is a bunch of things to be done. The devsummit was really different from last time I attended in 2010, and it seems to be much more organized and productive the way it is now.

On Thursday morning I attended the Beyond Buildworld working group. The subject of cross-building was in evidence again, with other topics and volunteers for making the tasks. Other interesting topics included Crochet and Source Tinderbox Redport, besides other tools to make a developer's life easier and help to keep the stability of the code.

In the afternoon I atteded the ATF working group. I hardly knew anything about ATF until this talk and started to play a bit with it after that. It's a great testing framework and it would be really useful to have it integrated into src.

Friday was the BSDCan start day and the opening session was amazing. Eric Allman shared his experiences of having his own company based on an opensource product. It was a great time to hear from such an experienced guy and learn a lot about his experiences.

I also attended Kirk Mckusick's talk about Security in the FreeBSD Kernel and the talk about NetBSD-based Radar, and after that MCLinker, which seems to be a promising project to replace current linker.

Day #2 started with Bob Beck telling about buffer cache in OpenBSD, and the future of wireless networking, by Adrian Chadd. After lunch, Henning Brauer told us the history of trouble they experienced with overcomplicated checksum on OpenBSD network stack. After that I was presented to newbus by Warner Losh, one of the best speakers of the conference in my opinion.

It was really good but was close to the end. The Closing Session was as cool as it was the last time I attended and we had a great time.

Sadly I didn't go to tourist things on Sunday since I was not feeling that good. I spent Sunday doing not much and left for the airport in the afternoon for the long trip back home. It was a great time as I met other ports committers and had nice talks. I also met other pfSense developers and users, and my coworkers from BSD Perimeter.

I would like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation and BSD Perimeter for sponsoring this trip and making it possible to meet other developers and hear such high-level talks. Hope to see you all in Ottawa next year.

Foundation at SouthEast LinuxFest

SouthEast LinuxFest will be held at the Blake Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina from Friday June 7 to Sunday June 9. Registration is required, but free, for this event.

There will be a FreeBSD booth in the Expo area, all three days. We will be giving out PC-BSD DVDs, FreeNAS CDs, and other cool swag, as well as accepting donations to the FreeBSD Foundation.

Foundation at Texas LinuxFest

There will be a FreeBSD booth (booth #21) in the Expo area at Texas LinuxFest, to be held at the AT&T Conference Center in Austin, Texas on Saturday June 1. Registration is required for this event at a cost of $25 or $55.

Stop by the booth to discuss the Foundation's projects, check out the cool swag, or to make a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation.

BSDCan Trip Report: Eitan Adler

The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored 7 attendees of BSDCan 2013. The first trip report is from Eitan Adler, a doc committer, who attended the BSDCan Developers Summit. Eitan writes:

I arrived Tuesday night and met Colin Percival at the airport.  After dropping off luggage at the university, I met up with some of the other developers.

The first day, I attended the "Netflix and FreeBSD" session run by Scott Long.  It was interesting to see what kind of problems users of FreeBSD ran into when running at scale.

For the afternoon working group, I chose to attend the "ports and packages" session.  A variety of topics were discussed but the most discussed topic was cross-building ports across both versions and architectures.  This is a topic that came up repeatedly in prior
discussion and that would come up again in other working groups, so it was good to know about the latest work in this area.

The vendor summit came next.  In the past, the vendor summit focused on kernel work but this one revolved around the user land.  This is particularly important to me as I run FreeBSD on my laptop as my primary development machine.

At night I spent some time in the hacking lounge or other shared areas meeting people.  It was very nice to be able to meet the people I've been talking to for the past three years.

On Thursday I spent my morning in the "Desktop" session.  Getting FreeBSD running well on desktops is critical in attracting new developers in the future.  Kris Moore, from PCBSD, spoke a lot about the customizations that they made.  I pressed to share the improvements
that could be committed upstream.  Other issues discussed were packaging for the desktop and a graphical boot loader for FreeBSD/PC-BSD.

The afternoon session for me was "Documentation": a significant portion of the discussion was about the future print edition of the book and what sections need to be updated and improved.  In particular, how we could get more source committers involved in writing documentation.  We also discussed how to work going forward with other teams that need access to the documentation (e.g., portmgr and postmaster).   We also touched on the FAQ, translations, and the new toolchain.  The final topic we discussed was the automated QA and statistics tools we have (and don't have) and how we could improve in that area.

After dinner I did some work at the documentation hackathon.  I spent the remainder of the night at the hacker lounge discussing kernel internals with Peter Wemm, Sean Bruno, and others.

Unfortunately, I had to leave prior to the conference itself, but I felt that meeting people at the developer summit was well worth the time spent.

FreeBSD Foundation Announces Ed Maste is New Director of Project Development

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce Ed Maste's new role as the Foundation's part-time Director of Project Development.  Ed has served on the Foundation's board for two years, and has stepped down in order to accept this new position.

In this position, Ed will manage the Foundation's sponsored work, including projects funded under specific grants, operational support and project development undertaken by the Foundation's permanent technical staff. Working with the Foundation's Board of Directors, Ed will identify and document specific areas of future project work interest. This roadmap planning will include coordination with FreeBSD consumers and the FreeBSD community.

"2012 represented an inflection point in the Foundation's history,'' said Justin T. Gibbs, President of the FreeBSD Foundation. "The Foundation has a stated goal of investing in permanent staff through 2013. With Ed taking on this new position I'm excited by the Foundation's increased capacity to manage our project development and operational support.''

Ed has over ten years of experience in companies building products on FreeBSD, in both technical and managerial roles. He resides in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.