This page describes the May 2007 FreeBSD Developer Summit, colocated with the BSDCan 2007 conference taking place in Ottawa, Canada. This is a by-invitation event.

It seems likely that a Quicktime feed of at least one track per day will be available. Authentication information will be sent to the FreeBSD developers mailing list closer to the time. In the meantime it looks like VLC or mplayer are the packages to install to get ready. The sessions will also be recorded in one way or another.

NOTE: Because of the unprecedented number of attendees for the developer summit, we are currently discussing format changes, such as multiple tracks. Please do not assume that any scheduling information is final. If you have work you want to present to the community, please contact RobertWatson or EdMaste, or just grab a time slot. Because of the size of the event, talks should be pithy.

* Registered for network stack cabal event; please see description below for registration information.

We recommend staying on the University of Ottawa campus, in the apartment style residences. These have two individual bedrooms and a shared bathroom and kitchenette. These have to be booked individually but a common reservation number will be provided to secure the special BSDCan rate. The BSDCan rate also includes breakfast each day.

Arrangements to share apartments will be made shortly.

This schedule covers the logistics of meals and locations to meet up with the group for those arriving throughout the summit. Box lunches will be provided by the University. Information on menus and pricing will follow soon.

Indian dinner: dvl has more information in the dinner they can arrange. They said: “We would be pleased to do a similar meal again for your group. Based on our new menu prices our group meal consisting of 3 Appetizers, 4 Meat dishes, 1 veg dish, rice and naans is priced at $28.00 plus taxes and grats. Pls advise if that meets your requirements.”

Hope that sounds OK.

If you have any other dietary requirements (vegetarian, nut allergies, etc), please contact dvl@ directly by e-mail.

The informal sessions are intended to be rough working group meetings for the purposes of brain-storming, code reading, hacking, and chit-chat. Sessions occur in parallel and on an ad hoc basis, although there are some scheduled events. This schedule will change! Feel free to add new events to this list.

Some other possible interest areas that might make good sessions, if a convener can be found:

• ZFS in FreeBSD: effects on documentation, installation, administration model, and how to generally exploit it. What features does ZFS not have, which our users require?
• Distributed file system cabal: NFS, NFSv4, Arla, OpenAFS, …
• Storage cabal: UFS, ZFS, swap, …
• Embedded cabal: hack-and-slash session on FreeBSD componentization and size evaluation, NanoBSD rant and fix-up session, documentation discussion, reference platforms, demonstrations, etc.
• Locking. John Baldwin (or someone else) goes over the ins and outs of the 37 kinds of locks we now have and strategies for using them.

The formal sessions on Thursday take on a more formal presentation style, and consist of a series of presentations and moderated discussions on specific topics. In many cases, the contents of these presentations may reflect the result of events on Wednesday. If you want to give a talk, sign yourself up. Sessions will likely be recorded and made available on the web later.

These minitalks are short (5-10 minutes) presentations or status updates, to be scheduled as time permits. These may/will be assigned slots in the above table as things shake out.

Feel free to add a BoF idea here. Maybe they meet over breakfast or dinner, during the day, or casually in the hacking lounge. By adding your idea here you can help build interest and get people thinking about what they might want to talk about. Or just add yourself to an existing topic.

Information some other recent developer summits:

DevSummit is the page for the EuroBSDCon 2005 developer summit, which took place in November, 2005.

200605 is the page for the BSDCan 2006 developer summit, which took place in May, 2006.

EuroBSDCon is the page for the EuroBSDCon 2006 developer summit, which took place in November, 2006.

The Network Stack Cabal will be hosting all-day marathon network stack code-reading and discussion session on 16 May in order to perform a large-scale review of the architecture and implementation of the FreeBSD network stack. This will be preceded by dinner and drinks on 15 May. The first 3/4 of 16 may will be spent doing spot reading and reviews of key network stack subsystems; the second 3/4 of the day will be spent reviewing notes and architectural approaches, as well as brain-storming architectural changes based on notes from the first part of the day. Participants will be assigned portions of the network stack to review in advance of attending so that they can lead review and discussion of those network stack components. Further details can be found on the 200705NetworkCabal page.

Please contact EdMaste or RobertWatson for more information on attending.

DavidMaxwell will present Coverity Extend, an extension environment for the Coverity Prevent tool already in use by the FreeBSD Project for static source code analysis. More information is available on the Coverity Extend Product Page. This session will describe how to construct new checkers, or invariants that can be tested by Prevent, and possible applications for the FreeBSD Project.

This is a series of talks by developers at major FreeBSD consumers, and will provide the opportunity for the FreeBSD developer community to gain insight into how FreeBSD is used. These talks may cover a variety of topics, including:

• The technical position of FreeBSD in the products of services offered by the company
• How FreeBSD has been modified or extended to serve the needs of the company
• How the company interacts with the FreeBSD community (or not), and what benefits (and costs) that has
• What the company is looking for out of FreeBSD in the future
• What the company plans to bring to FreeBSD in the future

This will be a 30-45 minute summary presentation of the results of the Network Stack Cabal meeting, in order to update the more general developer community. Possible areas of discussion include:

• SMPng MPSAFE network stack: what bits are left non-MPSAFE, and when are they being fixed or deleted?
• Non-MPSAFE network device drivers
• Multiple IPSEC stacks: who will be left standing?
• Cache-friendly network stack optimizations?
• Increasing concurrency opportunities in the network stack?
• 10gbps optimizations over the last year
• Revising zero-copy network stack optimizations
• Network stack virtualization

RobertWatson and ChristianPeron will discuss their implementation of zero-copy BPF, which allows BPF consumers to provide a shared memory buffer to the kernel that will be written into, avoiding the copy from kernel-space to user-space. This requires some refactoring of the BPF code. They will also discuss direct-to-disk support for BPF.

RobertWatson will talk about recent experiments with direct dispatch and netisr2, a revised framework for concurrent packet dispatch in FreeBSD 7.

RobertWatson will give a brief talk about how to give the talk, “How the FreeBSD Project Works.” This appears to be an effective presentation for advocacy at a variety of forums (not just BSD conferences).

WarnerLosh will describe the process of being a mentor in the FreeBSD project to new committers. He will briefly cover what is expected of a mentor, what the mentor does, what the mentor doesn't do and the care and feeding of mentees. Refreshments will be served to those that bring their own with them. Parking cannot be validated.

WarnerLosh will talk briefly and/or incoherently about his company's experience embedding FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/arm into its products over the past 8 years. This is really a segue into discussing how FreeBSD's successes in the embedded space can be leveraged for more design wins.

WarnerLosh will bring as many ARM boards as he can get past customs, set them up and let people watch them boot over a serial interface. And for an encore, he'll see about allowing those who haven't fallen asleep the chance to watch grass grow.

PawelJakubDawidek will describe current status of ZFS file system, as well as UFS journaling with gjournal. Next he will describe some nice-to-have features in UFS. At the end he will focus on differences between Solaris VFS and FreeBSD VFS observed while porting ZFS.

MarkLinimon will present a summary of the whiteboard discussion/brainstorming session about Problem Report workflow and GNATS status.

MichaelLucas will give a brief overview of how the process of writing and selling a technical book, focusing on FreeBSD, and what prospective authors can expect to encounter on the way. (This talk can be easily canceled at any time if the time slot is needed for something more useful.)