Episode Details

We recap EuroBSDcon in Paris, tell the story behind a pf PR, and show you how to do screencasting with OpenBSD.

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Recap of EuroBSDcon 2017 in Paris, France

• EuroBSDcon was held in Paris, France this year, which drew record numbers this year.
• With over 300 attendees, it was the largest BSD event I have ever attended, and I was encouraged by the higher than expected number of first time attendees.
• The FreeBSD Foundation held a board meeting on Wednesday afternoon with the members who were in Paris. Topics included future conferences (including a conference kit we can mail to people who want to represent FreeBSD) and planning for next year.
• The FreeBSD Devsummit started on Thursday at the beautiful Mozilla Office in Paris. After registering and picking up our conference bag, everyone gathered for a morning coffee with lots of handshaking and greeting. We then gathered in the next room which had a podium with microphone, screens as well as tables and chairs. After developers sat down, Benedict opened the devsummit with a small quiz about France for developers to win a Mogics Power Bagel. 45 developers participated and DES won the item in the end. After introductions and collecting topics of interest from everyone, we started with the Work in Progress (WIP) session.
• The WIP session had different people present a topic they are working on in 7 minute timeslots. Topics ranged from FreeBSD Forwarding Performance, fast booting options, and a GELI patch under review to attach multiple providers. See their slides on the FreeBSD wiki.
• After lunch, the FreeBSD Foundation gave a general update on staff and funding, as well as a more focused presentation about our partnership with Intel. People were interested to hear what was done so far and asked a few questions to the Intel representative Glenn Weinberg.
• After lunch, developers worked quietly on their own projects. The mic remained open and occasionally, people would step forward and gave a short talk without slides or motivated a discussion of common interest. The day concluded with a dinner at a nice restaurant in Paris, which allowed to continue the discussions of the day.
• The second day of the devsummit began with a talk about the CAM-based SDIO stack by Ilya Bakulin. His work would allow access to wifi cards/modules on embedded boards like the Raspberry Pi Zero W and similar devices as many of these are using SDIO for data transfers.
• Next up was a discussion and Q&A session with the FreeBSD core team members who were there (missing only Benno Rice, Kris Moore, John Baldwin, and Baptiste Daroussin, the latter being busy with conference preparations). The new FCP (FreeBSD community proposals) were introduced for those who were not at BSDCan this year and the hows and whys about it. Allan and I were asked to describe our experiences as new members of core and we encouraged people to run for core when the next election happens. After a short break, Scott Long gave an overview of the work that’s been started on NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture), what the goals of the project are and who is working on it.
• Before lunch, Christian Schwarz presented his work on zrepl, a new ZFS