The Foundation recently sponsored Damian Vicino to attend BSDDay Argentina. Here is his trip report:
BSDday is the only BSD conference in South America as far as I know. The event's inception was in 2008 by 2 BSD Users Groups in Buenos Aires City. participated as part of the organisation committee from 2009 - 2012. In 2013, the event had no edition because of some big changes in the livesof the people participating in the organisation committee. In my case, I moved out of the country (and the continent). Thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation, I was able to return to South America for a few weeks this year to re-float the committee and the event, making possible the run of a 5th edition.
We started the preparation a few months before by coordinating remotely, but there was a lot of stuff to be done in-place, so I traveled 10 days earlier. In the days before the event, I coordinated with Universidad de Buenos Aires to finish the arrangements for the space to run the event and the supplies needed for the event. I worked as the main contact for the university and dealt with all the paperwork; being the largest university in Argentina, there is a lot of paperwork for everything. An interesting institutional plus this year is that the Faculty of Science and Department of Computer Science of Universidad de Buenos Aires declared officially the BSDday as an Event of Interest. Simultaneously, Hernan Constante and Matias Celani were coordinating accommodations for one of the speakers who traveled from Mar del Plata and making arrangements to have food & coffee for the event. Thanks for their help and also to Alejandro Lazaro who was helping in all he could remotely since he also moved out of Buenos Aires.
The quantity of proposals for talks received this year was about half the usual. We contacted previous speakers for feedback and we decided to include discussion spaces to find out why and how we can make it better for next year. On August 9th, a few minutes before the event started, the first speaker had family emergency. We decided to delay the opening talk and use the time for a first open discussion about the event and its future. The attendance was the lowest ever, so we focused the first discussion space on this topic. It appears to be a consensus that August is not a good month for the conference, because of the power outages in Buenos Aires in summer. From previous years, we knew that November is not good either. Another apparent reason is the break in continuity of the event (in 2013). Everyone in the room actively participated in the open discussion spaces. We noticed from discussions that the demographics of the event had changed. This time, we had a group of desktop users, mostly from FreeBSD, while in previous years we had mostly sysadmins from OpenBSD working in large companies or ISPs.
After the discussion, I did the opening talk with the help of Hernan Constante. The talk was also open to discussion so it extended a little longer than programmed; lucky for us, having only 1 track, it didn't affect the schedule much. The second talk was for 40 minutes, but was extended up to 2 hours and ended up in a different topic than the one it started with. We were tempted to stop it, but people were asking so many questions that we let it flow. We then had 4 more talks (including mine) and 2 more spaces for open discussion about anything-BSD where we collected opinions about the event, about BSD in Argentina, and the future of BSD advocacy actions. Since we didn't have sponsors for the food/coffee/supplies, we asked if anyone wanted to contribute at the end of the event. We were glad to see that everyone in the room put in money and we almost covered every expense for the event in this way. After the event, about 90% of the people moved to the bar across the street to share some beers and we kept discussing until the bar closed and kicked us out.
The week after the event, I met again with some organisers to discuss ideas for next year and do some analysis of what happened this year. One week later, I met with some companies and professionals to check sponsoring possibilities for next year's edition.
Last week, I collected and processed the materials we obtained from the event: videos, photos, and slides from every presentation. I still need to recover a few videos that we had to download to one of the organiser's computer (who left the country before me). In the following weeks, we will upload the videos, slides and pictures and formally close this year's event in order to start working for the 6th edition, expected to happen in 2016.
Once again, thank you very much to the FreeBSD Foundation for helping me with the expenses for this trip, to the University of Buenos Aires Faculty of Science and Computer Science department for giving us the space and support, to Hernan Constante, Alejandro Lazaro, Matias Celani, the speakers, and all those who helped to make this event possible once again.
Monday, September 8, 2014
BSDDay Argentina Trip Report: Damian Vicino
Friday, August 29, 2014
FreeBSD Foundation announces IPsec Enhancement Project
The project adds new encryption modes while also importing infrastructure updates from OpenBSD giving FreeBSD users unprecedented support for high performance, encrypted communications. New modes include AES-CTR and AES-GCM with hardware acceleration using Intel’s AES-NI instructions. According to John-Mark, “on a modern 64-bit x86 CPU one core can process about 1 gigabyte per second of data” using the new AES-GCM mode.
Concurrent with this project, FreeBSD committer and pfSense employee Ermal Luçi will update the FreeBSD IPsec stack to take advantage of the new cryptographic modes.
Jim Thompson, a co-owner of both Netgate and ESF (the company behind pfSense), said “We are pleased to contribute to this project. Our interest in high-performance IPsec is obvious, however we also recognize the importance of contributing this capability to the FreeBSD project. Not only because our own software is based on FreeBSD, but for the benefit it brings to the entire community. We plan to have AES-GCM support for IPsec with AES-NI acceleration available in the 2.2 release of pfSense software.”
The project is currently in progress, with a planned completion at the end of September 2014.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
FreeBSD Foundation August Update Now Available
The FreeBSD Foundation August Update is now available. Get the latest Foundation news at: https://
EuroBSDCon 2014 Travel Grant Deadline Extended
The deadline for submitting your application for a Travel Grant to EuroBSDCon 2014 has been extended. Please submit your application by Friday, August 22, 2014. Find out more at: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/announcements#eurobsdcon2014
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
BSDCan Trip Report: Baptiste Daroussin
The next trip report is from Baptiste Daroussin:
Thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation I was able to attend BSDCan 2014.
I arrived in Ottawa on Tuesday evening and went directly to the Royal Oak where I met other FreeBSD developers.
On Wednesday, the DevSummit started with the FreeBSD future plans where I was mainly interested in pushing subjects like packaging base, dma(8) integration, improvements in kqueue, and status of the toolchain.
The afternoon was mainly spent meeting with many other developers to talk face to face on subjects which usually take a while to resolve via mail.
Thursday started with the ports and package session where I talked about the status of the package distribution: from building packages to distributing packages on the FreeBSD cluster. I gave a brief status about pkg(8). We talked about the pkg_tools decomission. We had a long and interesting discussion about the future of the ports tree. The other subjects we talked about were packaging-base, continuous integration of the ports tree, cross building packages, and the license framework.
Like the previous day, I spent the afternoon discussing pkg(8) with other developers, as well as phabricator, and discussing with clusteradm about different possibilities for distributed "extra" packages repositories.
On Friday and Saturday the main conference took place. There were plenty of different interesting talks I went to.
The main interesting one for me was " The architecture of the new solver in pkg" by Vsevolod Stakhov as it gave me more details about his wonderful work on pkg during GSoC 2013!
This conference has been really succesful for me. It was the first time we were able to get 4 pkg developers together: Vsevolod Stakhov (vsevolod@), Bryan Drewery (bdrewery@), Matthew Seaman (matthew@), and myself. I found it really productive to exchange ideas, share problems, and simply have discussion.
This conference also allows me to talk with clusteradm people, in particular Glen Barber (gjb), Peter Wemm (peter@), and Sean Bruno (sbruno@)
There was also the opportunity for 4 portmgrs, a future portmgr, and a former portmgr to have an informal meeting which was really great!
Friday, August 8, 2014
July/August Issue of The FreeBSD Journal Now Available
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
BSDCan Trip Report: Mark Linimon
The next trip report is from Mark Linimon:
The first day, Tuesday, was an unoffficial day, spent socializing.
The Developer's Summit began Wednesday. My main interest was to attend the "FreeBSD future plans" session. Of particular interest was the discussion about how Release Engineering should look in the future. The ports team has done a great deal of work to decouple ports releases from src releases. This required both changes in the way packages were built, as well as a substantial amount of new hardware to be able to build multiple package sets simultaneously. (Much of this hardware was purchased by the Foundation). This was the first change that many of the src and docs people had been brought up to speed on these developments.
Thursday, of course, my main interest was the Ports and Packages session.
In the evening, I was invited to an informal meeting with the various Ports Management Team (portmgrs) who were in attendance. (I had previously served for several years on this team.) Somehow, I was "volunteered" to rejoin the Ports Management team with an "advisor" status. Clearly, peer pressure works.
Friday the conference itself started. I spent some of the day trying to catch up on rest from the hectic first two days, and then socialized in the evening.
On Saturday, the most interesting session was the FreeNAS development talk. While it was informative, there was also an opportunity to heckle John Hixson.
Perhaps the most important task that I accomplished during the conference was to sit down with Bryan Drewery and discuss future software improvements to the Ports Monitoring System (portsmon), which I wrote.
portsmon has survived many changes in FreeBSD. The first was from CVS to SVN. More recently, the ports build farm has been switched over from the old portbuild codebase to a completely rewritten system. Our discussion dealt with the changes that I needed to make to port over to the new system; what the future changes to the new system would be; and changes that I requested that would make portsmon's job easier. These changes have now been incorporated. The next task is to catch up with the change from GNATS to Bugzilla; by that point, all of the inputs to portsmon will have been switched over from their initial codebase.
