NOTE: This is historical content that may contain outdated information.
This past Saturday, our very own Alexander Motin attended and gave a talk at KyivBSD in Kyiv, Ukraine. Alexander was kind enough to give us a recap of the event and share photos of his experience. In his own words:
“This year’s KyivBSD conference took place at the hall and auditorium of Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology (http://biph.kiev.ua). It was changed at the last moment, but the new option appeared to be even better: in the city center, more space, better auditorium, with a local cafe.
“People started to arrive around 9AM and proceeded with registration by Alexander Yerenkow. Those who paid the optional registration fee in advance received bags of souvenirs (t-shirts, stickers, notebooks, magnets, horns, …), the rest were given the option to purchase the items.
“At 10AM, Alexander Yerenkow opened the session with a short greeting.
“Dmitry Luhtionov stated the day with his talk, ‘Inside Netgraph, system tuning’, about the Netgraph internal subsystem, which included a description of the Netgraph node creation process and some possible kernel tuning.
“Following that, I gave my talk about the block storage subsystem in FreeBSD. Starting with some history, I gave a quick review of the storage stack from GEOM on top to ATA/SCSI at the bottom, and finished with my work on CAM/GEOM optimization.
“Then Aleksandr Rybalko gave a quick live demo of FreeBSD running on Efika MX Smarttop / RaspberyPi devices and invited more people to work on that area with the promise that it’s not hard and actually quite interesting.
“After that, K. A. Kornienko presented his new book, ‘FreeBSD 9: Corporate Internet Server’. This small book, written in Russian, is supposed to be a beginning guide for system administrators that have some knowledge of network technologies but are new to FreeBSD and the UNIX world. It seems the author was surprised by the number of people who were interested in buying copies of the book for their friends. 🙂
“Then we had a lunch in local cafe that gradually switched to random discussions in small groups. Alexander Yerenkow managed a charity lottery where winners won posters and USB sticks with FreeBSD.
“The second part of the conference opened with Konstantin Belousov’s talk, ‘VT-d and FreeBSD’. He described the Intel VT-d technology in general, the FreeBSD busdma(9) infrastructure, and explained how he plans to make them work together and the benefits of that work.
“The next talk was from Andriy Gapon and covered the problems of the original ZFS, its FreeBSD port, and some of the differences between Solaris and FreeBSD that create additional complications. During the Q&A session, he also talked about the OpenZFS initiative.
“The final talk came from Alexander Yerenkow regarding the concept of using ‘FreeBSD as Firmware’ — separation system and applications from configuration and data in separate read-only blobs to make updates controllable and reversible.
“Afterwards we had a small buffet with open discussions, that gradually moved to a nearby beer pub.
“The slides of presentations can be found here.”
Thanks to Alexander for sharing his experience at KyivBSD with us. The next conference we’re attending is already underway, so stay tuned for some updates from EuroBSDCon!
