EuroBSDcon 2015 Recap

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October 9, 2015

This year’s EuroBSDcon took place in Stockholm, Sweden and was an amazing mix of sessions, reunions and announcements. I had missed the last two EuroBSDcons and was delighted to see the people I love in a city I love. Many of us hit the ground running by working on various projects in the hotel the day before the FreeBSD DevSummit. Several members of the community and the FreeBSD Foundation were already in Stockholm for the ACM womENcourage career and outreach conference, which made for a warm welcome. The FreeBSD DevSummit was held at the Init.se offices and of the many topics, virtualization and the Intel graphics drivers updates stood out as two of the hottest. I gave a talk on FreeBSD Virtualization Options from a developer’s perspective and led the dialog for the rest of the day. The Intel graphics stack update by Jean-Sébastien Pédron the next day was quite active and appears to have resulted in a call for testing of Haswell graphics code that landed this week. FreeBSD is on its way to supporting the latest Intel graphics!
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After two days of Tutorials and the DevSummit, it was time for the main conference. This took place at Stockholm University and was kicked off by a keynote by Paul Vixie that traced his BSD journey and the Unix operating systems he has used over the years. “I’m loving FreeBSD 10 and consider bhyve, ZFS, ipfw and Clang to be the perfect environment”. He only lamented bhyve’s lack of Windows virtual machine support, which just happened to be a key announcement in my talk later that day. That’s right, the bhyve hypervisor now supports UEFI firmware and thus FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, SmartOS and Windows UEFI-booted virtual machines. This work has been years in the making and I wish to thank everyone who contributed to making it a reality.

I saw Andrew Turner’s talk on FreeBSD on Arm64 progress, Ted Unangst’s talk on Cryptography in OpenBSD and finally, Arun Thomas’s talk on the RISC-V architecture. Of these, Ted’s talk was a great look back at the predictions made in a 1999 USENIX paper on cryptography in OpenBSD compared to where we are today. Arun’s talk was a fascinating overview of the BSD-licensed RISC-V CPU architecture that is being developed at Berkeley and promises to be the hardware complement to the BSD operating systems. RISC-V systems can be prototyped today with FPGAs and run in simulators, including a browser-based one.
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On day two of the conference I saw Anders Magnusson’s talk on his proposal for a vacuum-tube computer that runs BSD, Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse’s talk on Portroach, based on FreeBSD Portscout, and Ingo Schwarze’s talk on six years of mandoc. Jasper’s talk gave me some ideas for how to better retrieve virtual machine ISOs and it is great to see how far mandoc has come as the standard BSD manual formatter. Wrapping up the conference was a humorous keynote by Patrik Fältström who described the challenges of growing and maintaining Sweden’s Internet infrastructure. Lastly, the FreeBSD Foundation took a moment during the closing session to thank Colin Percival, Allan Jude, Shteryana Shopova and myself for our contributions to the community. This was easily the best EuroBSDcon I have attended.
On a sadder note though, EuroBSDcon 2015 was dedicated to Paul Schenkeveld who passed away this year shortly after AsiaBSDCon. Paul played at key role in the formation of the EuroBSDcon Foundation and was famous for having attended every EuroBSDcon to date. In honor of his contributions, the EuroBSDcon Foundation set up a travel grant fund in his name and I encourage everyone to contribute to it when available.
Michael Dexter

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