Operating systems distributed under the BSD or other permissive licenses such as the BSD family, Haiku, and Minix share many things in common with other FOSS licensed OSes like Linux, but also face different challenges. These challenges include the need for alternatives to widely used GNU tools and the often surprising discovery of users of our systems.

The BSD Licensed Operating System developers room will gather users and developers from BSD licensed OS projects to discuss their individual projects and ways they can help each other achieve their respective goals. Talks about developments in particular operating systems are welcome as are talks or forums on ways we can work together. We also welcome presentations on foundational technologies which are of interest to developers of BSD licensed operating system and presentations on derivative operating systems such as Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

Please submit talk proposals or questions to fosdem@freebsd.org.

Brooks Davis <brooks@freebsd.org>

TBD

Speaker: Marc Balmer

Abstract: The Lua scripting language has been designed to be embedded into software written in C to allow for scripting and extending of such software. Lua is popular because it is easy to integrate and the language itself is simple and easy to learn. The compact code size and small memory footprint make it a candidate for embedded use.

Most Lua use cases are to extend end-user software, like e.g. the popular game “World of Warcraft” or the photo editing and archiving software “Adobe Lightroom”. In this presentation, however, the author will show how Lua can be used in an operating system kernel. An actual implementation will be presented based on the NetBSD Unix-like open source operating system.

Speaker: David Chisnall

Abstract: Most of the Free Software world currently uses the C++ stack provided by the GNU project, including the C++ front end to the GNU Compiler Collection and libstdc++, the GNU implementation of the C++ standard library. In 2007, these projects switched to version 3 of the GNU General Public License. As a result, newer versions have not been imported into FreeBSD and other projects with similar licensing conditions. GCC 4.2.1 and the associated libstdc++ release are the most recent that can be shipped with these platforms.

Since this release, a new version of the C++ standard, C++11, has been published. This includes a number of significant changes to both the language and the standard library. Some, such as r-value references, allow much more efficient implementation of some fundamental parts of the standard template library and make a significant reworking - if not a complete rewrite - desirable.

These two factors, the license and the need to support the new standard, made it desirable for FreeBSD to switch to a completely new C++ stack. This includes a variety of components. At the bottom sits the C++ runtime library, responsible for providing features such as exception handling and run-time type information. On top of this is the C++ standard library, which provides the classes that the standard mandates. None of this, of course, would be any use without a C++ compiler.

This talk will examine each of the components in the new, permissively licensed, C++11 stack, including libcxxrt, libc++, clang / LLVM, and the modifications that were required to FreeBSD to support all of these. Some of these libraries required writing from scratch, while others required effort to port or integrate. They all depend on various features that are not specific to C++, some of which already existed and some of which required implementing from scratch.

Speaker: Baptiste Daroussin

Abstract: Pkgng is a completely new package manager rewritten from scratch. It aims at replacing the old pkg_install. It is developed on top of new libpkg which is the high level library that does all the package management, it brings new features such as safe upgrade, (multi) repository support, integrity checking and more. It has been designed to be extensible while remaining fully compatible with the current FreeBSD ports tree.

Speaker: Guillaume Lasmayous

Abstract: pkgsrc is a cross systems packaging system, used in NetBSD, but also DragonflyBSD, MirBSD, Minix3 and a lot more. Through the example of shotwell, a digital pictures management application, this talk will give an introduction to pkgsrc for users and packagers.

Speaker: Nicolas Thauvin

Abstract: With binary package management tools such as pkgin or nih, building sets of packages and maintaining a repository becomes a need, mostly when managing multiple servers. This talk presents the setup of different bulk build solutions in pkgsrc.