FOSDEM 2010

This weekend I have participated at the FOSDEM 2010 open source event, annually held in Brussels at the ULB (Universite Libre de Bruxelles). It's a free-entrance conference with talks ranging from (Linux) distribution-related stuff and up to new trends in the OSS programming community. The nice part is that one can get a glimpse of the current status of the major projects and also hear about what's new and hot in the OSS domain.

The major themes that the sessions were grouped around were Distributions, Embedded, Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, Mono, Drupal, GNUstep, NoSQL, MySQL, Openmoko, X.org, Java, BSD. Since my interests revolve around FreeBSD and cross-distribution cooperation I have been attending mostly these two session groups. The general picture that I could gather is that better cooperation and integration (especially when it comes to packaging software) is desired but my feeling is that not too many people are yet ready to commit to such ideals. Things like openSUSE's Build Service and the shared dependency solver (CUDF) bring in nice touches but I believe more standardization and commitment are needed before something viable will be rolling out. Of course, it's hard to set on a commitment when one is not forced to but rather even lured to diverge inside this free (OSS) ecosystem. That's why I think it's worth paying attention to people like Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu's "angel investor") when they are preaching for synchronizing the efforts. Variety has its value, but so does consistency among various OS'es.

The talks were complemented by the booths outside the lecture rooms, most of the big distributions being present there. In the BSD camp I have seen FreeBSD/PC-BSD, NetBSD and, bit of a surprise, MirBSD (MirOS) sharing the desk with FreeBSD. Not too many BSD personalities around, only Brooks Davis that I could count from the FreeBSD core team.

As usual the O'Reilly books booth was pretty busy with interested people (yours included) and outside the halls you could opt for a treat of "frites" (french fries) or you could sample a few Belgian beers (it's quite a pity to miss that being in the famous country of a thousand beers).

All in all, this was an interesting experience, at least to see what the other camps are showing off or working on. You can see here a few pictures I made from the conference and around (also some slides from the presentations here). The organizers have promised the presentations video recordings in about a week.

Photos from SNW Europe 2009 conference

Here are a few pictures I made while participating at the SNW Europe 2009 conference:

• The conference (held at the Congress Frankfurt, Germany)
• Some slides from the conference

The conference gathered topics such as Storage, Cloud Storage and Services, Virtualization, Solid Storage, IT Management, etc.

Slides and Audio from EuroBSDCon 2009

For those of you who missed the talks or want to remember some of the things said, the slides and some audio recordings (only Stream A sessions) have been made available on the EuroBSDCon 2009 website.

While at it you may want to check out the EnterpriseBSD introduction slides that I presented in the Works-In-Progess session -- see my blog post on enterprisebsd.com.

Photos from EuroBSDCon 2009

Here are some pictures I made at EuroBSDCon 2009:

• The conference (held at the Robinson College, Cambridge, UK)
• Some slides from the conference (only "Stream A")
• Walking around the parks (near the Robinson College) and London

And a lot more pictures made by Rodrigo Osorio (?).

EuroBSDCon 2009 is over

Yes, the last day of the eighth edition of EuroBSDCon just passed. Nevertheless it was yet another interesting day which brought up to the stage interesting talks -- among them the "accf_smtp" filters built by Martin Blapp (and the small SMTP architecture war started with the OpenBSD "aussies"), the network stack tunings done by Henning Brauner in OpenBSD, the gory details in (correctly) implementing the SMB/SMB2 stack for FreeBSD presented by Zach Loafman and Brooks Davis' porting efforts for the major HPC (High Perfomance Cluster) packages (Ganglia, Sun Grid Engine, [Open]MPI). The "Stream A" took the spot again thought I kind of missed attending the PC-BSD presentation...

Then I took some time to walk a bit around the parks and came back just in time to catch the "State of BSD" session: Alistair Crooks presented NetBSD's advancements, Owain Ainsworth and Henning Brauner (as the "slides bitch") spoke for OpenBSD and George V. Neville-Neil took the stage for FreeBSD (and even beat the records for the presentation timing). Then the Work-In-Progress session: each speaker had exactly 3 minutes (strictly observed by Robert Watson :) ) to present his work or project. During this session I had the chance to introduce the new (unborn) kid on the block named EnterpriseBSD and make a short statement about what it wants to be and what help it needs from the community (e.g. we want your feedback!). Besides that we had on the stage the syadmins taking care of the internal network of machines that makes the FreeBSD project's wheels turn, 64bit quotas, FreeBSD on ARM plaform, mmap() improvements in FreeBSD, Luigi Rizzo's (continued) work on Dummynet and pluggable disk schedulers, ZFS gone production in 8.0, DHCPv6 (IPv6 support in DHCP 4.x), new NTP package and configuration in FreeBSD, NanoBSD on big servers.

During Robert's introductory speech it was announced that the next EuroBSDCon will be held in Karlsruhe (again, after 5 years) in October 2010. Hope I can be back there next year.

I still got pictures to be posted and more impressions to be shared — stay tuned...

A full first day at EuroBSDCon 2009

The first day of the conference was really a full one. I decided to follow all the "Stream A" talk sessions and I could say it's been the best for my research related to the EnterpriseBSD project — e.g. feedback on usage of FreeBSD in the enterprise/business environments.

Harrison Grundy brought up a nice insight on the oil & gas industry and their use of FreeBSD on staggering levels of storage and processing sizes. Then Konrad Heuer unveiled some details about what makes the gwdg.de network tick and the problems they encountered on their heterogeneous setup. And that brought up an interesting discussion about IBM TSM backup support issues on FreeBSD.

After a first tea & biscuit break Peter Losher entertained us about what ISC is doing (like, say, DNS root servers and mozilla.org/kernel.org/*BSD mirrors) and their help with testing the FreeBSD releases — you might be surprised to know that some root servers may be sometimes running a -BETA or similar snapshots (of course under the protection of anycast balancing and failback). Then came the lunch in the nice restaurant of the Robinson College.

Then almighty Kirk McKusick stepped up to speak about superpages in FreeBSD 8.0 under the close scrutiny of front-row phk@ (Poul-Henning Kamp) and John Baldwin. Hacker galore!

Afterwards, Zach Loafman unveiled some of the "secrets" under the hood of OneFS from Isilon — their clustered filesystem product. Hope they will succeed in releasing their mods to FreeBSD (especially Infiniband). And an amazing trip with Sam Leffler on the top of the Chile mountains where he helped installing a wireless link between two astronomical observatories found ~2,4km above the sea...

Then came Robert Watson with a short update session and then introduced one interesting security expert fellow (think prof. Dumbledore) who showed us what tricks the 'net gangsters are using nowadays. Quite a bit of laughs...

Then came the famous "Conference Dinner in the Great Hall at Clare College"; luckily I've been able to trade a place with someone else. Wouldn't have been surprised if Harry Potter shared the table with us... Lucky enough to get a place right next to George V. Neville-Neil, Poul-Henning Kamp (say "beerware license"!) and Brooks Davis. Robert Watson was just around, too. Quite a lively bunch they are...

Lots of pictures for today, unfortunately I forgot to bring an USB cable with me so it'll have to wait until I get back in Brussels. Until then... there is one more day. And possibly a surprise, if Robert W. will be kind enough to approve my WIP proposal on EnterpriseBSD.

EuroBSDCon 2009 has started

Day one of EuroBSDCon 2009 is already over — it was the tutorials session day. Tomorrow the talks session will start and probably it will be the peak of the conference.

I'm eagerly waiting for some of the talks tomorrow. Especially that some of them are from the enterprise/business perspective that I'm researching now for the EnterpriseBSD project. Like, say, "How FreeBSD finds oil" and quite a lot of the rest of the talks in "Stream A". Too bad I won't be able to join the Conference Dinner (booked out).

Will be posting more news tomorrow evening...