Episode Details

We recap vBSDcon, give you the story behind a PF EN, reminisce in Solaris memories, and show you how to configure different DEs on FreeBSD.

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[vBSDCon]

• vBSDCon was held September 7 - 9th. We recorded this only a few days after getting home from this great event.
• Things started on Wednesday night, as attendees of the thursday developer summit arrived and broke into smallish groups for disorganized dinner and drinks.
• We then held an unofficial hacker lounge in a medium sized seating area, working and talking until we all decided that the developer summit started awfully early tomorrow.
• The developer summit started with a light breakfast and then then we dove right in
• Ed Maste started us off, and then Glen Barber gave a presentation about lessons learned from the 11.1-RELEASE cycle, and comparing it to previous releases. 11.1 was released on time, and was one of the best releases so far. The slides are linked on the DevSummit wiki page.
• The group then jumped into hackmd.io a collaborative note taking application, and listed of various works in progress and upstreaming efforts. Then we listed wants and needs for the 12.0 release.
• After lunch we broke into pairs of working groups, with additional space for smaller meetings. The first pair were, ZFS and Toolchain, followed by a break and then a discussion of IFLIB and network drivers in general. After another break, the last groups of the day met, pkgbase and secure boot.
• Then it was time for the vBSDCon reception dinner. This standing dinner was a great way to meet new people, and for attendees to mingle and socialize.
• The official hacking lounge Thursday night was busy, and included some great storytelling, along with a bunch of work getting done.
• It was very encouraging to watch a struggling new developer getting help from a seasoned veteran. Watching the new developers eyes light up as the new information filled in gaps and they now understood so much more than just a few minutes before, and they raced off to continue working, was inspirational, and reminded me why these conferences are so important.
• The hacker lounge shut down relatively early by BSD conference standards, but, the conference proper started at 8:45 sharp the next morning, so it made sense.
• Friday saw a string of good presentations, I think my favourite was Jonathan Anderson’s talk on Oblivious sandboxing. Jonathan is a very energetic speaker, and was able to keep everyone focused even during relatively complicated explanations.
• Friday night I went for dinner at ‘Big Bowl’, a stir-fry bar, with a largish group of developers and users of both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The discussions were interesting and varied, and the food was excellent. Benedict had dinner with JT and some other folks from iXsystems.
• Friday night the hacker lounge was so large we took over a bigger room (it had better WiFi too).
• Saturday featured more great talks. The talk I was most interested in was from Eric McCorkle, who did the EFI version of my GELIBoot work. I had reviewed some of the work, but it was interesting to hear the story of how it happened, and to see the parallels with my own story.
• My favourite speaker was Paul Vixie, who gave a very interesting talk about the gets() function in libc. g