Welcome to the March/April issue of the FreeBSD Journal! This issue is all about development, whether of FreeBSD itself or using FreeBSD as a platform for developing other software. We open with a practical guide to FreeBSD kernel development from Navdeep Parhar. Navdeep describes a flexible and robust setup featuring virtual machines and the use of PCI passthrough for device driver development. Next, Ben Cooksley pulls back the curtain on KDE’s CI system outlining how the KDE project tests changes on FreeBSD. Tom Jones covers kernel debugging support in LLVM’s debugger (lldb). Specifically, Tom provides an example of extending lldb with new commands written in lua. Finally, Mark Johnston narrates the story of ZFS support in the makefs tool. While this is a useful feature for both users and developers, Mark used FreeBSD’s unique development environment to implement it.

One of the best places to swap development stories is at conferences whether in the hallway track between talks or over evening dinners. Olivier Certner provides a detailed glimpse into EuroBSDCon 2023 held at Coimbra, Portugal. A full slate of BSD conferences are planned this year including AsiaBSDCon (just completed), BSDCan May/June in Ottawa, Canada, and EuroBSDCon in September in Dublin, Ireland.

As always, we love to hear from readers. If you have feedback on any of our articles, suggestions for topics for a future article, or are interested in writing an article, please email us at info@freebsdjournal.com.

John Baldwin
Chair of the FreeBSD Journal Editorial Board