EuroBSDCon Trip Report

Presenting at EuroBSDCon ‘26 in Brussels, Belgium; September 2026

Federico Angelilli

This year I had the great opportunity to participate in the Google Summer of Code for the FreeBSD Project. Every summer, Google sponsors this event where students are paired with mentors from open source projects. They get to work on the project for a few weeks (12, in my case) and then receive a stipend to reward their efforts.

I came across this opportunity by chance. As I like doing low-level kernel programming, choosing the FreeBSD Project felt very natural. After my proposal for “Live-patching for the FreeBSD kernel” was accepted, I worked for three months to make the first revision of the subsystem and associated tooling. My mentors, Bojan Novkovic and Mateusz Piotrowski, recommended that I attend EuroBSDCon and invited me to the Devsummit, where I could expose my work to other developers and gather feedback to improve it.

I decided to follow their suggestion and, being still a student, asked the Foundation for a travel grant, which they kindly approved. This year, the event lasted five days (from September 9th to 13th), with the first two days dedicated to the FreeBSD Devsummit, one day for tutorials and then the conference proper. The chosen location was in the VUB campus, in the lovely city of Brussels, which I had visited just once before. Travel was fairly straightforward from and to the Brussels Airport in Zaventem, and I found lodging just 2km away from the site.

I had confirmed my talk allocation with Benedict Reuschling, the organizer of the Devsummit. Surprisingly, I was given the very first talk, at 10:30 of the first day. This ended up being a blessing in disguise as I was able to easily break the ice. After a few stressful minutes, I proceeded to continue my talk without problems. Thankfully everyone was nice and provided useful feedback and questions to reflect upon. I was initially quite afraid that seasoned developers would not like it. My idea was probably rooted in other circles where young/outsider contributions are seen badly if they touch vital components. However, I did not see that at all from the FreeBSD community, which is something I really liked. Instead, I immediately got good questions and feedback, those you would give to “fellow” developers. For example, markj@ asked how to apply security advisories’ patches as livepatch modules, to see if future deployment was possible.

After my slot was over, I continued to listen to other talks of the day. I had many opportunities to meet and talk with many other attendees: Robert Clausecker, Olivier Certner, Aymeric Wibo, Kyle Evans, Mark Johnston, Kristien Nielsen, Christos Longro, Charlie Li, just to name a few. Overall my work for live-patching was received quite well, which was very encouraging to see.

The following day I continued to attend talks. I particularly liked the one about scheduler improvements from olce@. I talked quite a bit with fellow young attendees, George (Polarian) and Goran. I was also quite happy to see a few other Italians at the conference, such as Vanja Cvelbar, Toni Tiveron and Stefano Marinelli. I had a good talk with Eirik Overby, who brought a few vintage computers to the event, including a 486. I was eventually invited to dinner with him and some of his colleagues from Entersekt.

On the third day, I attended a few talks of the EuroBhyveCon in the morning. Then in the afternoon I followed the Ports Any% Speedrun tutorial by Mateusz. The day was wrapped up with a wonderful dinner at a local restaurant arranged by Aymeric for me and other young attendees. There, I had the pleasure to dine also with Kirk McKusik and Eric Allman.

Saturday was the first day of the conference proper. I followed the following talks that day:

The night 142 of my servers went up in the clouds. Physically. By Stefano Marinelli
Run Time Reoptimization for Modern Heterogenous Systems by gnn@
BSD as a Foundational Platform for Nationwide Semiconductor Education in Japan by Hiroki Sato
Base system packages in Production: A Practical Overview by Lukas Engelhardt

That evening the social event was held in the Africa Museum just outside of the city. We were taken to the location by a wonderful vintage tram. I really enjoyed the food, company and location of the event.

Sunday was the last day of the event, and it was quite busy. Pontus Stenetorp made a small raffle in the morning, and I ended up winning a nRF52 development kit. The sessions I attended that day were:

Hotplugging adventures in the bhyve hypervisor by Bojan
Bringing memory safety to BSD with CHERI by Brook Davis
ELKE – Encrypted & Lovely Kage Environment, using FreeBSD by Vinícius
Keeping up with language-based packaging systems in Ports (especially Python) by Charlie Li

I also participated in the final session that wrapped up the conference, which included the traditional auction of things people had lost.

In the end, I learned a great deal of things from this conference, many of which are difficult to put into words. But I will say this: this community, even if relatively small, is precious and must be preserved.
For all fellow students, you should definitely come to the conference, even if you are not a BSD “expert”. Everyone I talked to was very friendly and happy to help you integrate with the community.

Thanks again to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my attendance to my first BSD conference. – Federico Angelilli

Federico Angelilli is an Italian student, currently finishing his Bsc in Computer Engineering at Sapienza University of Rome. He is passionate about operating systems, system programming, and contributing to the open-source community.