Hi, I am helping to organize the FreeBSD developer summit colocated
with BSDCan in Ottawa, Canada. I have noticed several e-mails from
folks at Adara Networks on the mailing lists, and as a project we
are always eager to interact with companies and individuals using
FreeBSD. To that end, we would be very happy to have you or people
from your teams attend.
The summit is held during the two days preceding the BSDCan talk
sessions: Wednesday, May 11th and Thursday, May 12th. The first day
of the developer summit will consist of several half-day working group
sessions. Each session will be focused on a specific topic and is
chaired by a FreeBSD developer. These sessions are invite only and
are also limited in terms of space, so must e-mail the session chair
directly to apply for a spot in a session. Working group requests
must also be cc'd to devsummit@freebsd.org so that we can keep track
of overall attendance. The working groups are listed below and on the
devsummit wiki at:
http://wiki.FreeBSD.org/201105DevSummit
On the second day of the summit we will be planning the release
of FreeBSD 9.0, as well as a session on what the project will
be working on for FreeBSD 10.0. We will also have a session
where the working groups summarize their work from the previous day.
One change for this year is that the short talks normally given during
the developer summit will now be available to all BSDCan attendees in
a FreeBSD developer summit track during the BSDCan talk sessions on
Friday, May 13th and Saturday, May 14th.
The working groups for the developer summit this year are:
Morning Sessions (9:00 - 12:00 on Wednesday, May 11th)
Vendor Summit headed by George Neville-Neil (gnn@FreeBSD.org)
FreeBSD has many companies as customers, some of which have needs
in common and some of which have divergent needs. The purpose of
this working group is to give these customers the ability to give
feedback to the project in such a way that it can all be collected
and analyzed in one place as well as giving the various
constituents the ability to figure out what they do and do not
have in common. Furthermore this will be a forum for the project
to learn about features or code that have been developed outside
the project, but which would benefit from being offloaded from our
customers and included in the base system.
Ports headed by Erwin Lansing (erwin@FreeBSD.org)
The biggest challange the ports framework faces today is the ease
of upgrading an previously installed system. While the upgrade
path by building from source is handled quite well by external
tools like portupgrade and portmaster, using prebuilt binary
packages downloaded from the official FreeBSD mirrors is not that
easy. This session should end with a better strategy on how to
move forward with pkg_* tools and binary packages within the
restraints set by cluster and distribution resources.
Additionally, guidelines need to be set for the use of the
recently added license framework.
Early Afternoon Sessions (13:00 - 14:30 on Wednesday, May 11th)
Capsicum headed by Robert Watson (rwatson@FreeBSD.org)
Capsicum (practical capabilities for UNIX) is a security
sandboxing scheme targeted at application compartmentalisation,
and will ship in FreeBSD 9.x, developed in collaboration between
the University of Cambridge, Google, and the FreeBSD
Project. Capsicum supplements traditional discretionary and
mandatory access control in FreeBSD by allowing applications to
define their own internal security compartmentalisation. The goal
of this session is to look at Capsicum features, look at how they
might be integrated with base system applications (server daemons
and command line tools) and third party applications (Chromium,
KDE, PDF rendering, ...). We will also consider current design
choices and known issues, such as the adopting of an IDL between
components, as well as potential future directions.
Virtualization headed by Justin Gibbs (gibbs@FreeBSD.org)
This group will focus on using FreeBSD with virtual machines and
will include topics such as Xen, hypervisors, etc.
Late Afternoon Sessions (15:00 - 16:30 on Wednesday, May 11th)
Networking headed by Bjoern Zeeb (bz@FreeBSD.org)
The group will focus on network layer 2 to layer 5 topics. The
main goal will be to identify where we are, what ideas, plans or
needs exist for the upcoming 9.x and 10.x releases, as well as
identifying people to drive indivual projects.
PCI headed by John Baldwin (jhb@FreeBSD.org)
There are several gaps in FreeBSD's PCI support. Many of these
gaps are features needed by multiple commercial consumers of
FreeBSD. A specific example is HotPlug PCI. The goal would be to
gather representatives from multiple interested parties all in the
same room and hash out plans for each of the desired PCI features
as well as to establish the priority of each of of the desired
features. Other topics may include PCI advanced error reporting
and improvements to resource management.
File Systems headed by Kirk McKusick (mckusick@FreeBSD.org)
This group will focus on file system topics such as SoftUpdates
with Journalling in UFS, possible features for a UFS3, NFS, and
adding missing lock (or removing) filesystems that are not yet
MPSAFE.
The fee for the devsummit is $65 CDN and includes lunch and snacks for
both days of the developer summit.
If you have any questions or would like to attend, please let myself
or one of the other organizers know. You can reach us at
devsummit@FreeBSD.org.
--
John Baldwin