2016 EuroBSD Trip Report: Kamil Czekirda

The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored my trip to Belgrade, Serbia in September 2016, where I attended the FreeBSD devsummit and EuroBSDcon 2016. I would like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my trip.

I arrived at Belgrade on Wednesday in the afternoon with Mariusz Zaborski and Michał Mazurek (akfaew@OpenBSD) by plane from Warsaw, we found the Raddison Blu Hotel, checked in and dropped off our luggage. I spent the rest of the day with Mariusz and Michał sightseeing. Rene, my roommate arrived late at night.

The first day of the Developer Summit started with our-presentations and then some of us joined the Testing and CI working group chaired by Li Wen Hsu. After a short introduction to the internal of CI system developers, we discussed and reviewed the system architecture from the security point of view. The next thing were the new features and integration with external projects. It was the most interesting part of the DevSummit for me, because I am still working on my GSoC project about Testing Cluster. After lunch, we joined two rooms together to form a big one and that was the only session about security, packaging base and toolchain.

The second day of the devsummit started with presentations. One from GSoC 2016 project entitled “Developing a high performance virtual machine networking solution for the bhyve hypervisor”, where Vincenzo Maffione showed the results of his latest work. The second presentation was about using FreeBSD in slot machines and Roberto Fernandez Cueto showed his implementation of algorithm of positioning the cursor on the touchscreen. After lunch we reached the climax of the devsummit, when developers showed the most important tools they use in hacking. There was a lot of amazing stuff like sl or T-rex in Chrome browser. The next topic of the devsummit was the Q&A Session with the FreeBSD Foundation members.

The main conference started on Saturday with George Neville-Neil’s keynote about the future of BSD. From that day I really liked the talks about packaging the FreeBSD base system, replacing OpenSSL in FreeBSD base and “Dropping in 80Gbits (hopefully) of stateful firewalling capacity with PF and OpenOSPFd”.  The last one was especially very fascinating. Gareth Llewellyn showed how to build high performance and high availability network, based on open and free software.

The last day of the conference for me started with Emmanuel’s Vadot talk about supporting Allwinner SoCs by FreeBSD. The most interesting talk for me was the next one: “Continuous Integration of the FreeBSD Project” given by Li-Wen Hsu. The next talk I participated in, was about DTrace, where Arun Thomas dug into the architecture and internals of the DTrace framework. Next was the talk about Jim Thomson’s recent work on characterizing and improving the performance of the Open Crypto Framework. The final keynote was about the threats in the Internet and Internet self regulation.

That day Allan Jude directed me to new people whom I gladly met. The first was Brooks Davis. Allan and Brooks agreed to look at my work on extensions for bsdinstall. I also met Kristof Provost. We talked about problems concerning bridging tap and lagg interfaces.

I think that attending conferences like these is a huge motivation, for new people, to work. It was a great opportunity to meet people I had known only from the Internet. I hope I will be able to participate in devsummits and BSD conferences again in the future.