November 12, 2025
This year’s EuroBSDcon took place at the faculty of engineering and computing of the University of Zagreb, Croatia. This was my second time attending EuroBSDcon after holding a talk on my work on
[SIMD-enhanced libc string functions] at EuroBSDcon 2024 in Dublin, and I was really looking forwards to this year’s conference. I am grateful to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my travels to the conference, as it would have otherwise been hard to afford for me.
I travelled and later shared a room with Jan Bramkamp, who held an excellent talk on ZFS-based jail provisioning at the conference. Living in Berlin, Germany, we took the opportunity to travel to Zagreb by ICE train to Munich and the via sleeper car to Zagreb. This allowed us to reach the venue well rested, and gave us a chance to enjoy a scenic view of the Slovenian countryside. At the conference, we were joined by Getz Mikalsen and Benni Stürz, two students who were introduced to the project through participation in last year’s Google Summer of Code, as well as another interested student from Berlin.
For the first time, this year’s EuroBSDcon was extended to five days. The first two days were allocated to the FreeBSD Dev Summit, followed by the Eurobhyvecon, with tutorials running in parallel. On the fourth
and fifth days, the EuroBSDcon proper was held, with a wide assortment of talks in three parallel tracks.
The first day of the FreeBSD devsummit, I was most interested in the talks on the progress of the pkgbase project (slated to replace our home-grown freebsd-update(8) with proper packaging in FreeBSD 15), as
well as the upstreaming of the CHERI work. I ended up spending a lot of time in the hallway track as well, catching up with many of the other project members attending the conference. An unexpected item of
interest was Alfonso Siciliano’s talk on accessibility in FreeBSD, a topic you seldomly hear about otherwise.
The second day brought some interesting insights into the function of the core team and the various problems its members are dealing with, as well as some insights into libzfs. The third day was a bit of a
beather; I did not attend Eurobhyvecon, and later ended up joining some other developers on a trip to the Technical Museum Nikola Tesla just a short walk away.
The fourth and fifth days were both packed with talks to the point where it was some times hard to pick a track to attend. Following my colleage Jan Bramkamp’s talk on FreeBSD jail provisioning with ZFS,
I learned a lot about the challenges in porting OpenJDK to FreeBSD in Harald Eilertsen’s talk; as a frequent contributor to the ports tree, dealing with such problems is of particular interest. In the next
slot, a talk on a lightweight protocol for job servers to be used in parallel build tools like make(1) gave some new directions for how to tackle this problem in a tool-independent manner. Following a pkgbase
talk, Björn Zeeb went into details on the progress made in getting WLAN drivers to work on FreeBSD—a vital issue for our quest to improve Laptop support. While my laptop’s Qualcomm QCNFA765 adapter
remains unsupported for now, great inroads have apparently been made and it’s only a matter of time for full support. The day was closed with a talk on the FreeBSD ports tree by Moin Rahman, a discussion on
which we ended up continuing at the social event.
On the final day, I unfortunately missed the keynote but managed to attend Kirk McKusick’s presentation on the history of the UNIX daemon (the first edition of which I had missed last year). After lunch, there
was a tricky pick between Charlie Li’s MIDI talk and John Baldwin’s presentation on linkers, the latter of which I ended up attending. This was followed by a talk on decentralized internet services, and then a
very enlightening talk on the inner workings of USB-C. Before closing, I attended a talk on the use of FreeBSD for better UNIX education. This was of particular interest as we hold an annual course on UNIX systems administration, covering FreeBSD, AIX, and Solaris, at FU Berlin and have been looking into ways to improve the material.
Besides the conference program, I am grateful for the opportunities to meet many of the other FreeBSD developers and talk about many of the issues and project ideas floating around. I hope that next year’s
conference in Brussels, Belgium will be just as great as this one!
With big thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring this trip.
Robert Clausecker