December 5, 2017

My summer kicked off in pretty awesome BSD-flavored form as I was invited by Netzkommune GmbH to work on the following FreeBSD-focused projects:

  • Making FreeBSD suspend/resume work and test it on X240 (Haswell chip)
  • Making VirtualBox-SharedFolder support work for FreeBSD guests
  • Maintaining ports (like MySQL)
  • Porting latest-stable of mod_pagespeed for FreeBSD

Naturally, my goal for attending EuroBSDCon was to connect with the right people to talk about things I’ve done and/or how to do (and finish it) in the best way.

For the MySQL and VirtualBox projects, I had been trying to reach out to Oracle for the upstreaming patches to find a way to make it less burdensome for everyone (i.e. me as the maintainer, and Oracle as main developer).   I should note that it had been a long time since MySQL8.0 was upgraded.  This is due to the fact that the source archive’s build system wasn’t correctly considered being built as a Position Independent Code (related to the kind of default is set and the number of ports it’s dependent on).

I met brnrd@ at Dev Summit so we could work together on MySQL8.0 (also based on a recommendation from a guy who works at Oracle that said brnrd@ has magical abilities 🙂 ).  Together, we  successfully updated our MySQL8.0 on FreeBSD to the latest upstream, which already had some patches included in the upstream.

I met other people like Li-Wen Hsu, whom I collaborated with on the the VirtualBox-Sharefolder.  He shared some good information with me and provided me with the right connections that helped me to reach a conclusion and potential solution for the project.

I met Ed Maste, who helped me to resolve the licensing issues I was having with Oracle – since they didn’t seem to want to accept a patch unless it’s licensed under MIT or developer signs a contribution agreement.

During my meeting with bapt@, I asked him to check out my ideas about redesigning MySQL ports to:

  • have separate libmysqlclient port
  • being able to install different version of MySQLs installed at same time on a system

In addition to meeting all these folks at the conference, I also did a talk after lunch on the first day.  I shared the details of the Netzkommune project related to FreeBSD and answered people’s questions related to the work.  There also was a Linuxulator-related review (about adding execveat syscall) that I talked about, which people also shared their opinion on it with me.

To sum it up, I enjoyed the conference because I got a chance to meet a lot of people.  The culture exchange was also a nice aspect of the conference.  I met a lot of people from different places and different age groups. EuroBSDCon 2017 provided me a unique opportunity to meet and discover new things from every culture.