Trip Report: Daichi Goto

The next EuroBSDCon trip report is from Daichi Goto:

Thank you for the great support of my journey to EuroBSDCon 2011 and the FreeBSD DevSummit 2011. It was a great experience. Thank you again.

On the first day of the DevSummit, I attended the Ports, Toolchain, and Capsicum working groups. These days, GPL-free toolchains are becoming a big concern between *BSD folks and users not only for business reasons but because they are technically interesting. Many developers and users require GPL-free toolchains and FreeBSD 10 represents a big milestone for that. The working group discussions were very exciting and had a forward-looking attitude.

The new idea “Package Set” and the weekly package set release are important for most common FreeBSD users. Come to think of it, developers and advanced users prefer to use the Ports Collection as their package management system, but it’s hard for most novice users, lightweight users and enterprise-class managers who just want to run a stable system for their jobs. FreeBSD’s current binary package management system is not good for updating as it can result in package update failures. The Package Set and the weekly update mechanism have an advanced potential to solve this issue and provide a more comfortable and easy to use packages update experience.

The new security feature “Capsicum” is valuable for all *nix. The working group discussions about Capsicum and FreeBSD have given developers a chance to discuss which libraries, commands and 3rd party applications would benefit from Capsicum. Capsicum will be a default feature from FreeBSD 9.1 and FreeBSD 10 will be the new land of Capsicum security.

On the 2nd day, the last session “FreeBSD 10 Thinking” provided me a chance to re-think the design and the implementation of our unionfs. FreeBSD’s unionfs was reimplemented to solve some lock issues some years ago and it works very well in most situations. But in some situations, the current unionfs implementation causes a kernel panic because of kernel memory exhaustion. Also, our VFS based multi stackable unionfs implementation has some issues that are very difficult to solve. Based on the advice from hrs, we (I and ozawa-san) are re-thinking the design and implementation to improve robustness and reliability, as well as to include some new features such as the dynamic mount layer moves-up or moves-down and non-top layer umount. We are going to brush up our design ideas and try to do experimental developments for FreeBSD 10. I’m pleased to get a good chance at this.

The EuroBSDCon 2011 keynotes and sessions have also given me some great inspirations. My thanks goes to the EuroBSDCon 2011 committee members and sponsors. I’m looking forward to seeing all you at the next EuroBSDCon, and of course, if it is possible, I’m looking forward to seeing you at Spring, AsiaBSDCon 2012 in Tokyo. That’s during cherry blossom’s beautiful season.

When I get back to Japan, I am going to write some news and articles about FreeBSD and the conference for some Japanese IT media, including Gihyo.jp FreeBSD Daily Topics, MYCOM Journal, and @IT.. For most common Japanese developers and users, English news sources are hard to understand. My Japanese articles around FreeBSD are very valuable for Japanese users of FreeBSD. Thank you again for the FreeBSD Foundation’s travel support.