July 1, 2019
BSDCan 2019 report:
The FreeBSD Foundation kindly agreed to sponsor my flight to Canada for the BSDCan 2019 conference this year. I am extremely appreciative of this. It was my 3rd time attending BSDCan, my first one was long ago in 2005, and I really admire how much larger and professional the conference has become during recent years. Special thanks to Dan Langille for his efforts and work.
I arrived 2 days before bhyvecon to walk around Ottawa, start Gelato marathon, and discuss various BSD topics with Benedict Reuschling who arrived a day later. The first event was bhyvecon organized by Michael Dexter. We discussed various bhyve topics around general hypervisor issues, NVMe support, edk2 UEFI and porting efforts to SmartOS. OpenBSD presented vmm for bsd.network and how to use it for Mastodon instance and NetBSD presented an overview of virtual machine monitor and nvmm backend. I’m excited we keep moving quite progressively with bhyve development and have a very strong core team. The following 2 days were full with the devsummit. Anyone who is not familiar with the devsummit should definitely try to get an invitation from the FreeBSD developers and attend it someday. Intel and NetApp presented bhyve & UEFI and ONTAP CI accordingly, some CI pieces would really help FreeBSD for our actual CI pipeline. I’ve attended various working groups sessions: “Testing and CI” as well as “pkgbase”. All in all, these days were both very productive and very exhausting.
After a nice breakfast at Coras I headed to the BSDCan conference. The 1st day I attended numerous talks like “Migrating bhyve guest”, “The future of OpenZFS”, and “Netflix and FreeBSD”. I talked to a lot of people and presenters, exchanged opinions, learned new things, and of course laughed a lot. The 2nd day was even more full of conversations and talks.
My 3rd BSDCan conference was full of positive vibes and I learned a lot that I can use for my daily job. I’d recommend that everyone book BSDCan 2020 ASAP.
-Contributed by Kirill Ponomarev