June 27, 2024
Presenters: John Baldwin, Ed Maste, Benedict Reuschling, and Li-Wen Hsu, FreeBSD Core Team
The FreeBSD Developer Summit 2024 began with an opening keynote by John Baldwin, which set the tone for transparency and assurance within the FreeBSD community. Baldwin emphasized the importance of well-defined oversight roles, particularly for cluster administrators, to ensure the community’s trust and reliability. “We have a duty to our users and companies to be transparent and build assurance in what we are doing,” Baldwin noted, highlighting the community’s commitment to openness and accountability.
Much of his talk focused on the Core Team’s strategic initiatives. Baldwin stated the need to focus heavily on ports infrastructure and continuous integration (CI), critical for maintaining FreeBSD’s robustness and efficiency as it adapts to new technological demands. He discussed exploring using autotool (automated tooling) and ecosystems to streamline the FreeBSD build process, aiming to enhance the project’s overall stability and performance.
The keynote addressed efforts to support new hardware features and advanced computing approaches, including GPU and AI capabilities with CHERI and ARM Morello. These initiatives reflect a forward-looking vision for FreeBSD, ensuring it remains competitive and relevant in the rapidly evolving tech landscape. Baldwin’s remarks indicated a strong commitment to integrating cutting-edge technologies into FreeBSD, thus future-proofing the operating system.
Overall, the opening keynote set a tone of progressive change and community engagement, laying the groundwork for the detailed sessions and discussions throughout the summit.