FreeBSD Developer Summit

University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Cambridge, UK September 17 - 18, 2009

This invitation-only FreeBSD Developer Summit took place at EuroBSDCon 2009, located in Cambridge, UK. Information from 200808, was also in Cambridge. Advanced registration was required to attend this event.

This event has now taken place.

EuroBSDCon 2009 will take place between 18-20 September 2009. All devsummit attendees are encouraged to attend EuroBSDCon, as well as present their work at the conference. Note that the second day of the devsummit is the EuroBSDCon tutorial day.

The conference is located at Robinson College at the University of Cambridge; the developer summit will make use of the conference venue for some activities, including residence. Other portions of the devsummit may also take place at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, which is a short walk from the residence at Robinson.

Cambridge, UK is located approximately 45 minutes North of London by train, with easy access by bus or train to St. Pancras International - Eurostar (45m rail), London Stansted Airport (STN - 40m rail), London Heathrow Airport (LHR - 2h rail), London Gatwick Airport (LGW - 2h rail), Manchester Airport (MIA - 4h rail), London Luton Airport (LTN - 1h25m bus).

European attendees may consider Eurostar or Stansted Airport preferred routes due to short transit time to Cambridge and lower prices. Visitors from the US or elsewhere will likely need to travel into one of London's major international airports, such as Heathrow or Gatwick. With the exception of Luton Airport, rail offers a more convenient but more expensive route to Cambridge than bus.

Rooms at Robinson College will be booked via UKUUG; registration the developer summit, for the conference, and room booking, will be available shortly via UKUUG.

NOTE: There is some discussion of a tourist outing to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford on Monday 21 September. Bus service runs to and from the Cambridge City Centre and Cambridge Rail Station to Duxford every half hour. Big buildings full of lots and lots and lots of airplanes. Details TBD.

Registration is now open; a £25 DevSummit registration fee will be charged for all attendees in order to cover lunch, beverages, and venue costs. Use the UKUUG registration URL sent to the FreeBSD developers mailing list to register for both the devsummit and main conference, as well as book rooms. Please add yourself to the attendee list below as well (and guests in the guest section). Don't mark yourself as UKUUG registration confirmed, we'll do that once your registration has been confirmed.

PLEASE NOTE: REGISTRATION HAS NOW CLOSED

(sorted by last name)

Developers were welcome to invite guests to attend the developer summit, subject to their tolerance for ceaseless hours of kernel-hacking, and availability of space at the venue.

The developer summit will span two days, with presentation material in the mornings and hacking/working groups in the afternoons. A formal schedule will be determined closer to the event. Feel free to add items to our rough agenda – we have room for up to four sessions at once on both days, although will likely reserve “talks” for the mornings and “discussions”/“hacking” for the afternoons.

We have reserved four rooms in the William Gates Building for the developer summit, most of which will be available between 8:30am and 5:00pm on both days:

PLEASE NOTE: FOOD AND DRINK ARE ALLOWED ONLY IN FW26

Leaders: SamLeffler, RuiPaulo

Interested folk: GavinAtkinson

Length: 25 minutes

Status and review of the wireless networking support in 8.0 (and later). Sam will talk briefly about virtual radio support and TDMA. Rui will talk about the Draft 802.11s (mesh) support. We will discuss the need for more developer involvement, especially in the area of drivers.

Leader: RobertWatson

Interested folk: JonathanAnderson, SimonNielsen, VolkerWerth, PawelJakubDawidek, RuiPaulo, StanislavSedov

Length: 25 minutes

This session will present updates on the University of Cambridge's on-going capability security research project based on FreeBSD, Capsicum. This scheme provides an OS sandbox model as well as capability extensions to the POSIX API, and we're plotting merging these features into FreeBSD 9.0. This will be structured as a morning talk followed by afternoon discussion.

Leader: BjoernZeeb

Interested folk: RobertWatson, SimonNielsen, MarkoZec, PawelJakubDawidek, BrooksDavis

Length: 55 minutes

• One year later, back in V_Cambridge: this session will provide a history of FreeBSD virtualization, a status update on where things stand with virtualized kernel subsystems,
• as well as plot future work. Possible topics: vstorage (generalized vnet allocator), memory and resource reservation for virtual subsystem instances, virtualizing more components and subsystems, management models, regression tests, and more.

Leader: ???

Length: 55 minutes

Interested folk: RobertWatson, GavinAtkinson, ErwinLansing, AlexanderMotin, PawelJakubDawidek, JohnBaldwin, BrooksDavis, RuiPaulo, AttilioRao, StanislavSedov, BradDavis, BjoernZeeb

Whiteboard photos and transcripts: FreeBSD9

Leader: GavinAtkinson, VolkerWerth

Interested folk:

Length: a series of 25-minute or 55-minute slots

Spend some time with interested folk looking at various bugs, and hopefully either get some fixes committed, develop patches, or understand what further information the PR needs before it would be useful. We'll probably try to keep a room running most of the time as a sort of “drop in and lend a hand when you're not doing anything else” room, but may also have windows where we focus on PRs within specific areas (e.g. networking).

Leader: SimonNielsen

Interested folk: RobertWatson, GavinAtkinson, PawelJakubDawidek, BrooksDavis, RuiPaulo, StanislavSedov, BradDavis, BjoernZeeb

Length: 55 minutes

Talk about possible signing of FreeBSD release data, packages etc. and the related key management which would be required. E.g. should we start having a FreeBSD CA with a real PKI. It it also important to discuss what it means to sign data, IE. which gurantees do we make.

Leader: SimonNielsen

Interested folk: ErwinLansing, BrooksDavis, StanislavSedov, BradDavis

Length: 25 minutes

Currently we only have a version number in the kernel. This means that for example freebsd-update has no good way to indicate when the userland has been patched for a security advisory or an errata. Ideas on how to handle this could include a separate userland version number or some way to have a list of installed patches e.g. similar to UPDATING.

Leader: EdSchouten

Interested folk: GavinAtkinson, VolkerWerth, AlexanderMotin, RuiPaulo

Length: 55 minutes

I am currently working on a replacement for Syscons. There are a couple of things I want to do differently and it seems Syscons isn't really suited for that, such as good Unicode handling, etc. I have a working prototype that works with VGA using graphics mode and text mode on x86, but it still needs a lot of love. There are some bits that we could already consider importing into SVN, such as Unicode support for the keyboard code, etc.

I think it would be nice if we could have some discussion on FreeBSD's desktop support. It would be nice if we had someone who knows a lot about DRM, especially our in-kernel code.

Leader:

Interested folk: RobertWatson, SimonNielsen, GavinAtkinson, ErwinLansing, BjoernZeeb, JohnBaldwin, BrooksDavis, RuiPaulo, StanislavSedov

Length: 55 minutes

Over the past year, the FreeBSD Project has been migrating from CVS to Subversion as its primary revision control system. What has happened, how did it work out, and where do we go next? The goal of this session is to identify a concrete plan for completing the migration to Subversion:

• Building out a network of Subversion repository mirrors
• Migrating from SVN→CVS→Perforce to SVN→Perforce
• Building releases from Subversion
• Internal tool consumers, such as cvsweb, Coverity, tinderboxes, pointyhat, etc.
• User migration issues, from mergemaster to source code upgrade
• Configuration recommendations for companies building FreeBSD-derived products
• Issues in supporting CVS/cvsup over the long term
• Commit mail and mergeinfo

Leader: HansPetterSelasky

Interested folk: VolkerWerth, GavinAtkinson, StanislavSedov

Length: 55 minutes

• General USB discussions
• Bring your broken USB device
• Support for USB3.0 in FreeBSD
• Technical issues
• Fundraising

Leader: WojciechKoszek

Interested folk: RuiPaulo, SamLeffler, GavinAtkinson

Length: 25 minutes

Due to my internship in HIIT/Ericsson, we seem to have NetFPGA driver working right now in FreeBSD. Card can be programmed from the user-space utility with a provided bitstream file and communication going via all 4 Gigabit ports seems to work as well. Several issues exist due to interesting nature of this hardware. Proposed topics:

• Presentation of a NetFPGA driver for FreeBSD
• Discussion on driver's infrastructure design and implementation
• Explanation, how NetFPGA is (a bit) different than other hardware
• Interrupt dispatching in NetFPGA
• Bitstream licensing issues (bring as firmware? push to ports?)
• Integral user-space NetFPGA application's place (src? ports?)

Driver still needs a lot of work, but I hope comments obtained from Devsummit people will be useful for me.

Leader: RobertWatson

Interested folk: RuiPaulo, StanislavSedov, GavinAtkinson

Length: 55 minutes

Session to present Apple's Grand Central Dispatch (libdispatch) concurrent programming API.

Leader: DougRabson

Interested folk: StanislavSedov, VolkerWerth

Length: 25 minutes

A new BSD licensed Debugger for FreeBSD. Full support for threads, shared libraries, TLS, vector floating point and more. GDB isn't the only game in town anymore.

Leader: KrisKennaway

Interested folk: StanislavSedov, VolkerWerth, BradDavis, GavinAtkinson

Length: 55 minutes

Leader: AlexanderMotin

Interested folk: GavinAtkinson

Length: 25 minutes

Existing ATA(4) infrastructure was started more then 10 years ago. While it is still quite functional and stable, there are many issues and limitations within it. Now I am working on completely new ATA subsystem, based on CAM infrastructure. I will describe my past work, as well as my future plans.

Preliminary map of Cambridge 2009 devsummit locations 2009CambridgeDevsummitMap.pdf.

First floor room map for the William Gates Building

• Visit Cambridge
• National Rail
• National Express (bus)
• BAA (airports)

• http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2020672&id=1255471528&l=e6725d21c8
• http://people.freebsd.org/~simon/gallery/eurobsdcon-2009/index.html