October 26, 2018

I would like to start by thanking the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my trip to EuroBSDCon 2018, which took place in Bucharest, Romania.

I arrived the day before the FreeBSD devsummit, and Vinicius, who was also sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation, was waiting for me at the airport. We arrived at the AirBNB we had booked together and then slowly walked to meet Marcelo Araujo (araujo@) and Ion Mihai Tectu (itectu@) for the first unofficial dinner of the conference.

The next day the devsummit began. Throughout the morning, participants mostly hacked on their own or in small groups; so that’s what I did, hacking on my Pinebook (An arm64 netbook). At the end of the morning, we came up with a list of topics to discuss for the rest of the devsummit. Almost all the topics had one things in common: What do we want for FreeBSD 13. Even though FreeBSD 12 has not yet been released, we all are thinking about the future. What software should we include? How can easy desktop/laptop usage be improved? etc …

As usual, the devsummit never really ended when we left the venue. It continued through the organized dinners. Each dinner was at different restaurant, and each time the food was excellent.

During the devsummit I spoke with Tome Jones (tj@) and Jules about the pinebook support for FreeBSD; tj@ got offered one during the devsummit and since he will have another one soon he gave it to Jules to help test and develop drivers for it. Since I’m the main developer on arm64 Allwinner System on Chip we talked about what is missing and who will work on what tasks so we don’t collide.

Next was the conference where a lot of great talks happened. I personally liked “Using Boot Environments at Scale” by Allan Jude, and “The end of DNS as we know it” by Carsten Strotmann on the first day. The second keynote (“Some computing and networking historical perspectives” by Ron Broersma) at the end of the first day was also excellent, we learned a lot about the history of internet.

The social event took place that night. It was located at the speaker hotel, which was not far from the conference venue. We all had a really good time and again the food was excellent.

The first talk I went to on the the last day of the conference was “Taking NetBSD kernel bug roast to the next level: Kernel Sanitizers” by Siddharth Muralee and Kamil Rytarowski. There have been a lot of talk recently on adding kernel sanitizers to FreeBSD and this talked helped us visualize the end goal, including some of the advantages to the addition of kernel sanitizers. The Second talk was “Livepatching FreeBSD kernel” by Maciej Grochowski, this one was also very interesting and I hope that we will see the patches soon. During the afternoon I mostly attended the hallway track, talking with the other users and developers (mainly about ARM support, of course).

As always, this trip was wonderful, and thanks again  to the FreeBSD Foundation for helping making this possible.

Submitted by: Emmanuel Vadot