Episode Details

Allan reports on his trip to BSD Taiwan, new versions of Lumina and GhostBSD are here, a bunch of OpenBSD p2k17 hackathon reports.

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Allan’s Trip Report from BSD Taiwan

• BSD TW and Taiwan in general was a fun and interesting experience
• I arrived Thursday night and took the high speed train to Taipei main station, and then got on the Red line subway to the venue. The dorm rooms were on par with BSDCan, except the mattress was better.
• I spent Friday with a number of other FreeBSD developers doing touristy things. We went to Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building from 2004 - 2010. It also features the world’s fastest elevator (2004 - 2016), traveling at 60.6 km/h and transporting passengers from the 5th to 89th floor in 37 seconds.
• We also got to see the “tuned mass damper”, a 660 tonne steel pendulum suspended between the 92nd and 87th floors. This device resists the swaying of the building caused by high winds. There are interesting videos on display beside the damper, of its reaction during recent typhoons and earthquakes. The Taipei 101 building sits just 200 meters from a major fault line.
• Then we had excellent dumplings for lunch
• After walking around the city for a few more hours, we retired to a pub to escape the heat of the sunny Friday afternoon.
• Then came the best part of each day in Taipei, dinner!
• We continued our efforts to cause a nation wide shortage of dumplings
• Special thanks to Scott Tsai who took detailed notes for each of the presentations
• Saturday marked the start of the conference:
  • Arun Thomas provided background and then a rundown of what is happening with the RISC-V architecture. Notes
  • George Neville-Neil talked about using DTrace in distributed systems as an in-depth auditing system (who did what to whom and when). Notes
  • Baptiste Daroussin presented Poudrière image, an extension of everyone’s favourite package building system, to build custom images of FreeBSD. There was discussion of making this generate ZFS based images as well, making it mesh very well with my talk the next day. Notes
  • Brooks Davis presented his work on an API design for a replacement for mmap. It started with a history of address space management in the BSD family of operating systems going all the way back to the beginning. This overview of the feature and how it evolved filled in many gaps for me, and showed why the newer work would be beneficial. The motivation for the work includes further extensions to support the CHERI hardware platform. Notes
  • Johannes M Dieterich gave an interesting presentation about using FreeBSD and GPU acceleration for high performance computing. One of the slides showed that amd64 has taken almost the