This year I arrived at BSDCan a day late due to issues in Chicago. However, upon arrival I hit the Royal Oak and chatted up the OpenBSD guys that are always there. They showed me how well ‘suspend’ and ‘resume’ worked on their laptops.
© Ollivier Robert
I was able to attend the second day of the DevSummit where I went to the ports and packages session and learned about the direction that ports and packages are going. They talked about how they’ve integrated Jenkins into the system now as well. Afterwards, I attended the OpenZFS session where Matt Ahrens talked about the history of ZFS, the goals of the project, and new and upcoming features.
I attended several talks during the conference, the bulk of which were ARM related. One was on ARM superpages, another on FreeBSD ARM internals, and yet another on the BeagleBone on FreeBSD. These were all excellent talks as I’m trying to get up to speed with ARM code so that I can hack it more.
One of the best aspects about BSDcan is the hallway conversations between attendees. I spoke with Michael Lucas about the new book he is writing on FreeBSD and ZFS storage. Michael Dexter is writing BHyVe scripts to run all of the BSD’s as well as Linux. I told lots of folks about the new features in FreeNAS and several people were interested in the domain controller functionality.
Throughout the conference, lots of people hung out in the Hacker’s Lounge at the residence hall well into the wee hours of the morning. I was no exception. I got a lot of good FreeBSD hacking done and was able to get FreeBSD loaded on my Chromebook. This made me very happy! I’d like to continue to work on this so that FreeBSD runs well on Chromebooks.
John Hixson
Senior Software Developer
