Episode Details

We recap our devsummit experiences at BSDCambridge, share why memcmp is more complicated than expected, explore Docker on FreeBSD, and we look at a retro terminal.

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BSDCam recap

The 2017 Cambridge DevSummit took place from 2-4 August 2017. The event took place over three days including a formal dinner at St John's College, and was attended by 55 registered developers and guests.

• Prior to the start of the conference, we had a doc hacking lounge, the computer lab provided a room where we could meet and try to spend some time on documentation. Sevan walked two interested people through the process of creating a documentation patch and submitting it for the first time. In the process, found ways to improve the documentation on how to write documentation.

The event is run "un-conference style" in that we brainstorm the actual session schedule on the first morning, with a focus on interactive topics that reflect the interests and exploit the knowledge of the attendees.

• The idea is to maximize the amount of discussion and decisions that can be made while we are all in the same room
• The first morning, we all gather in the slightly too small, and even more slightly under air conditioned FW11 classroom. We go around the room introducing ourselves, and listing a few topics we would be interested in discussing. Eventually the whiteboard is full of topics, with various numbers of ticks beside them to indicate the number of interested people
• There are breakout rooms of all sizes, so even topics with only a small group of interested folks can get a lot accomplished
• The most difficult is trying to schedule the sessions, as there is much overlap and people usually want to be in concurrent sessions, or someone's schedule means they won’t be available that day, etc.
• This years working groups:
  • Toolchain (Compilers, Linkers, External Toolchain, Static analysis and sanitizers)
  • Virtualization (bhyve, xen, jails, docker)
  • Transport (TCP) and Network Performance
  • Security and mitigations (W^X, noexec stack, CFI, ASLR, KASLR, Safe Stack, etc)
  • Testing (Status, What to test, How to test, QA for releases)
  • Capsicum (Automation with LLVM etc, Casper, Namespacing, “Services”, capsh)
  • Desktop / WiFi (drm-next, drivers, resume, power, installer, desktop, OOB Experience)
  • Tracing (Blackbox, DTrace, KTR, ptrace, truss, hardware tracing)
  • Packaging and Packaged Base (Sets, Kernels, Ports & flavours, sub-packages, privlib)
  • Architectural Security Features (CPU Features: SGX, PXN/PAN, Pointer Authentication, AMD Memory Encryption, Libcrunch, RISC-V, CheriABI)
  • Architectures and Embedded systems (RISC-V, ARM, ARM64, MIPS(64), SPARC64)
  • Teaching (Audiences, Objectives, Targets, Material, future directions)
  • Provisioning and Management Tools (CfgMgmt tools, Image building, VM/bhyve orchestration, Preconfigured VMs for testing, Wishlist)
  • Storage (ZFS status update, ZFS encryption infrastructure, ZFS Zero Copy / Sendfile, Acceleration of checksums and raidz parity calculations, sesutil, mpsutil)
• And that wasn’t everything. We then had a series of short talklets:
  • Enhancing and replacin