October 13, 2026
This year, I had the great opportunity to participate in the Google Summer of Code for the FreeBSD Project. 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 the 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 accepted. 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 to and from 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. 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 Longros, 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 also dine 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 lost.
Thanks again to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my attendance to my first BSD conference.