NetBSD Multimedia Resources List

Links on this page refer to multimedia resources (podcast, vodcast, audio recordings, video recordings, photos) related to NetBSD or of interest for NetBSD users.

This list is available as chronological overview, as a tag cloud and via the sources.
This list is also available as RSS feed

If you know any resources not listed here, or notice any dead links, please send details to Edwin Groothuis so that it can be included or updated.

Tag: pdf

• Lousy virtualization, Happy users: FreeBSD's jail(2) facility
  Source: UKUUG
  Added: 02 April 2007
  Tags: ukuug, presentation, freebsd, jails, poul-henning kamp
  Slides (2.7 Mb)
  Lousy virtualization, Happy users: FreeBSD's jail(2) facility by Poul-Henning Kamp (phk@FreeBSD.org)

• Poul-Henning Kamp - GBDE -- Spook strength disk encryption
  Source: Swiss Unix Users Group Conference 2004
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: suug, presentation, gbde, poul-henning kamp
  Slides (113 Kb), Paper (104 Kb)
  GBDE is a disk encryption facility designed with both usability and strength as requirements and it attempts to protect both the user and the data. The talk is about avoiding self-deceiving analysis, how to make real world usable cryptography and generally protect yourself and your data. Required skill level: Laptop user.

• Hendrik Scholz - Performance bottleneck detection and removal
  Source: Swiss Unix Users Group Conference 2004
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: suug, presentation, performance, hendrik scholz
  Slides (213 Kb)
  Once a system is exposed to heavy load bottlenecks need to be addressed to prevent single components from slowing down a complex installation. Highlighting various hotspots their detection and removal gets discussed using real life examples.

• Max Laier - PF - Extended Introduction
  Source: Swiss Unix Users Group Conference 2004
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: suug, presentation, pf, altq, max laier
  Video/MPEG (94 Mb), Slides (1 Mb), Audio/MP3 (22 Mb)
  The talk will introduce packet filter (pf) - a *BSD firewall system - and summarize its history and projected future. After providing a short overview of pf's general functionality and some firewall basics, it will concentrate on packet filter's advanced feature-set from the administrator's point of view. The talk will also cover the integration of ALTQ, a mature framework for traffic shaping and priorization. Finally it will provide a short overview of the "Common Address Redundancy Protocol" (CARP) and its integration in pf.

• Poul-Henning Kamp - Old mistakes repeated (but you do get the source code now)
  Source: Swiss Unix Users Group Conference 2004
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: suug, presentation, unix, mistakes, poul-henning kamp
  Slides (65 Kb)
  UNIX is the best operating system ever designed so everybody is running UNIX on their computer, right ? This presentation takes a partisan looks a why UNIX never became a big success in the eighties, failed to win the market in the nineties, and still struggles in the market in the new millenium. Poul-Henning will take a critical look at the mistakes of the past and the mistakes of the present and try to make it really clear what needs to happen for UNIX to become a real success.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Paeps Philip - How-to embed FreeBSD
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, embed, freebsd, philip paeps
  MP3 (1 byte, 43 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 43 minutes), PDF (1 byte, 17 pages)
  This paper provides a how-to embed FreeBSD. A console server built form an AT91RM9200 based ARM system will be explored. This paper will talk about the selection of hardware. It will explore creating images for the target system, as well as concentrate on different alternatives for deploying the system. A number of different options exist today, and no comprehensive guide for navigating through the choices exists today. This paper will explore the different alternatives that exist today for producing images targeted at different size requirements. The differing choices for storage in an embedded environment are explored. The techniques used to access rich debugging environments are discussed.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - George Neville-Neil - Multicast Performance in FreeBSD
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, multicast, freebsd, george neville-neil
  MP3 (1 byte, 39 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 39 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  In the past ten years most of the research in network protocols has gone into TCP, leaving UDP to languish as a local configuration protocol. While the majority of Internet traffic is TCP, UDP remains the only IP protocol that works over multicast and as such has some specific, and interesting uses in some areas of computing. In 2008 we undertook a study of the performance of UDP multicast on both 1Gbps and 10Gbps Ethernet networks in order to see if changing the physical layer of the network would give a linear decrease in packet latency. To measure the possible gains we developed a new network protocol test program, mctest, which is capable of recording packet round trip times from many hosts simultaneously and which we believe accurately represents how many environments use multicast. The mctest program has been integrated into FreeBSD and is now being used to verify the proper operation of multicast on various pieces of 10Gbps hardware.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Pedro Giffuni - Working with Engineering Applications in FreeBSD
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, engineering applications, pedro giffuni
  MP3 (1 byte, 51 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 51 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  In recent years, traditional branches of engineering like Civil, Chemical, Mechanical, Electrical and Industrial Engineering are requiring extensive computing facilities for their needs. Several well known labs (Sandia, Lawrence Livermore) rely on huge clusters to do all types of complex analysis that were unthinkable a couple of decades ago. While the free BSD variants share the environment with traditional UNIX systems, frequently used for such computations, it was not common to find adequate free software packages to carry complex calculations. Eventually commercial versions of important math related packages started to appear for the Linux platform. Even when the big packages were distant, the BSDs learned and adapted in resourceful ways: Matlab and Mathematica, running under Linux emulation, demanded functionality from the BSDs and NetBSD implemented a signal trampoline to be able to run AutoCAD with IRIX binary compatibility. A notable project that was always available under a free license was Berkeley's Spice circuit analysis program, however it was an exception rather than the rule. Even when the scientific community pressed for a while to get other important tools like NASA's FEA package Nastran under a free license, the objective of being able to access and enhance open scientific tools was elusive. About a decade ago the situation started to improve: FreeBSD's ports system started growing exponentially, first with a high content in the math category, afterwards with a CAD section and after sustained growth in those categories a science section was created. This growth was mostly pushed by Universities and their research projects and in general are not well known with respect to the commercial counterparts. I started porting math/engineering code for FreeBSD around 1996. Back then it was absolutely unthinkable for a Mechanical Engineer to depend only on FreeBSD for it's daily work. The situation nowadays is different: there are some very high quality engineering analysis packages like EDF's Code Aster, with more than 12 years of professional development, that just can't be ignored. A Finite Element package, like Code Aster, can easily cost 5000 US$, is priced according to the maximum problem size it can solve, can require yearly licenses, and is rarely available with source code. In NASTRAN's case the source code is only available for US citizens under a yearly fee. Free software does have serious limitations though; just like in office applications there are proprietary CAD formats or sometimes the package simply doesn't have the required functionality. Having the sources, of course, always has the advantage of being able to implement (or pay for) some specific functionality you might need. Many commercial packages have been recently ported to Linux, but even when they gain some of the advantages of an open environment they still have yet another limitation: they have been very slow to make use of the multicored features of the new processors in the market, a huge limitation now that the speed war between processors has been limited by the overheating problem. The objective of the talk is to give an overview of several CAD/CAE packages that have been made available recently as part of FreeBSD's ports system and the decisions that were made to port them. BRLCAD and Varkon are two CAD utilities that made a transition from closed source to an open environment and in the process in the process of getting ported to BSD have gained greater portability and general "bug" fixes critical for their consolidation as usable and maintainable projects. There are also some tricks that have not been well documented: it is possible to enable threads and some extra optimizations on some packages, and it is also possible to replace the standard BLAS library with the faster GOTO BLAS without rebuilding the package. It is also possible to build the packages optimized for a clustered environment, but perhaps what is most interesting of all is how all the packages interrelate with each other and can turn FreeBSD into a complete enginering environment. No OS distribution so far is offering all the engineering specific utilities offered through FreeBSD's ports system: from design to visualization, passing through analysis FreeBSD is becoming an option that can't be ignored, and best of all, it is an effort that will benefit not only FreeBSD but the wider audience.
  Pedro F. Giffuni M. Sc. Industrial Engineering - University of Pittsburgh Mechanical Engineer - Universidad Nacional de Colombia I was born in Bogota, Colombia but I am an Italian citizen. My experience with computers started when I was about 12 years old With the TRS-80 Color Computer first using Basic and the OS-9. I studied electronics for 3 years but became tired of worrying about "whatever happened to electrons in there" and moved to Mechanical Engineering. For a while I rested from the computer world until the Internet came stepping along. I started using FreeBSD around 1995 and soon fell in love with the idea of being able to install a complete version of UNIX from the net with just one floppy. After submitting a the 999th port to the FreeBSD project Walnut Creek was kind enough to give me a subscription for several years to FreeBSD's CD-ROM. Since then I've been on and off porting software packages or fixing the bugs I have caused while porting them. Of course there has always been great respect for the other BSDs and their wonderful license and while I've given up on the idea of one day seeing a "UnifiedBSD" I am glad to see different approaches sharing ideas in a healthful environment.
  Keywords: BSD, engineering, CAE, CAD, math, mechanical, FreeBSD ports

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Constantine Murenin - OpenBSD Hardware Sensors Framework
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, openbsd, hardware sensors, constantine murenin
  MP3 (1 byte, 47 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 47 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  In this talk, we will discuss the past and present history and the design principles of the OpenBSD hardware sensors framework. Sensors framework provides a unified interface for storing, registering and accessing information about hardware monitoring sensors. Sensor types include, but are not limited to, temperature, voltage, fan RPM, time offset and logical drive status. The framework spans sensor_attach(9), sysctl(3), sysctl(8), sensorsd(8), ntpd(8), snmpd(8) and more than 67 drivers, ranging from I2C temperature sensors and Super I/O hardware monitors to IPMI, RAID and SCSI enclosures. Several third-party tools are also available, for example, a plug-in for Nagios and ports/sysutils/symon. Originally based on some ideas from NetBSD, the framework has sustained many improvements in OpenBSD, and was ported and committed to FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD.
  Constantine A. Murenin is an MMath graduate student at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo (CA). Prior to his graduate appointment, Constantine attended and subsequently graduated from East Carolina University (US) and De Montfort University (UK), receiving two bachelor degrees in computer science, with honors and honours respectively. A FreeBSD Google Summer of Code 2007 Student, OpenBSD Committer and Mozilla Contributor, Constantine's interests range from standards compliance and usability at all levels, to quiet computing and hardware monitoring.
  http://Constantine.SU/

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Ion-Mihai Tetcu - Improving FreeBSD ports/packages quality
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, ports, packages, ion-mihai tetcu
  MP3 (1 byte, 56 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 56 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  This talk is focused on ways to improve the quality of FreeBSD's ports and packages and it's partially based on the 5 months experience of writing and running the consecutive versions of "QA Tindy".
  Ion-Mihai "IOnut" Tetcu is a 28 years old FreeBSD ports committer and maintains about 40 ports scattered in the Ports Tree. He lives in Bucharest, Romania where he runs and co-owns an IT& company and he's a member of Romanian FreeBSD and FreeUnix User Group (RoFUG). His non-IT interests include history, philosophy and mountain climbing.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Yvan Vanhullebus - IPSec tools: past, present and future
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, ipsec, yvan vanhullebus
  MP3 (1 byte, 46 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 46 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  The first part will explain what have been major changes since Manu's presentation at Bale's EuroBSDCon, including more detailed informations on changes which have a significant impact on administrator's bad habits (why the common way of doing it is bad, why it was sometimes needed in the past, how to do it the good way now, why this is far better), on both the UserLand (ipsec-tools project) and maybe in [Free|Net]BSD kernels/ IPSec stacks.
  The second part will talk about the future of the project. News of the next major version (which may be out or about to be out when we'll be ate EuroBSDCon), news works which are planned or which are done but not yet public, but also news about the team: it's new members, new tools, what we would like to do in tue future, a
  Yvan VANHULLEBUS works as an R&D security engineer for NETASQ since 2000, where he works on FreeBSD OS. He started to work on KAME's IPSec stack in 2001, provided many patches for various parts of the stack, then became one of the maintainers of ipsec-tools project, a fork of KAME's userland daemon. He became a NetBSD developper when ipsec-tools was migrated to NetBSD's CVS.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 Keynote - George Neville-Neil - Thinking about thinking code
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, george neville-neil
  MP3 (1 byte, 37 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 37 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  EuroBSDCon 2008 Keynote - George Neville-Neil - Thinking about thinking code

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Robert Watson - FreeBSD Network Stack Performance Optimizations for Modern Hardware
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, network stack, hardware, robert watson
  MP3 (1 byte, 53 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 53 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  The arrival of high CPU core density, with commodity quad-core notebooks and 32-core servers, combined with 10gbps networking have transformed network design principles for operating systems. This talk will describe changes in the FreeBSD 6.x, 7.x, and forthcoming 8.x network stacks required to exploit multiple cores and serve 10gbps networks. The goal of the session will be to introduce the audience to general strategies used to improve performance, their rationales, and their impact on applications and users:

  • Introduction to the SMPng Project and the follow-on Netperf Project
  • Workloads and performance measurement
  • Efficient primitives to support modern network stacks
  • Multi-core and cache-aware network memory allocator
  • Fine-grained network stack locking
  • Load-balancing and contention-avoidance across multiple CPUs
  • CPU affinity for network stack data structures
  • TCP performance enhancements including TSO, LRO, and TOE
  • Zero-copy Berkely Packet Filter (BPF) buffers
  • Direct network stack dispatch from interrupt handlers
  • Multiple input and output queues
  
  Robert Watson is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory investinging operating system and network security. Prior to joining the Computer Laboratory to work on a PhD, he was Senior Principal Scientist at McAfee Research, now SPARTA ISSO, a leading security research and development organization, directing government and commercial research contracts for customers that include DARPA, the US Navy, and Apple Computer. His research interests include operating system security, network stack structure and performance, and windowing system structure. He is also a member of the FreeBSD Core Team and president of the FreeBSD Foundation.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Martin Schuette - Improved NetBSD Syslogd
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, netbsd, syslogd, martin schuette
  MP3 (1 byte, 42 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 42 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  Martin Schuette has three main goals, defined by three internet drafts to implement:

  • TLS transport is the most obvious improvement: it provides a reliable network transport with data encryption and peer authentication. To make full use of this a buffering mechanism to bridge temporary network errors is implemented as well.
  • Syslog-protocol extends the message format to use a complete timestamp, include a fully qualified domain name, and allow UTF-8 messages. It also offers a structured data field to unambiguously encode application dependent information.
  • Syslog-sign will allow any syslog sender to digitally sign its messages, so their integrity can be verified later. This enable the detection of loss, deletion or other manipulation syslog data after network transfer or archiving on storage media.
  
  Martin Schuette is a student of computer science in Potsdam, Germany, and has been working as a part-time system administrator for BSD servers since 2004.
  In 2007 Martin Schuette already gave a talk on Syslog at the Chemnitze Linux-Tage (http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2007/vortraege/detail.html?idx=547 in german; for a newer english version see these slides for a seminar talk: http://fara.cs.uni-potsdam.de/~mschuett/uni/syslog-protocols-080522.pdf).

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Aggelos Economopoulos - An MP-capable network stack for DragonFlyBSD with minimal use of locks
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, dragonflybsd, mp, network stack, aggelos economopoulos
  MP3 (1 byte, 42 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 42 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  Given the modern trend towards multi-core shared memory multiprocessors, it is inconceivable for production OS kernels not to be reentrant. The typical approach for allowing multiple execution contexts to simultaneously execute in kernel mode has been to use fine-grained locking for synchronising access to shared resources. While this technique has been proven efficient, empirical evidence suggests that the resulting locking rules tend to be cumbersome even for the experienced kernel programmer, leading to bugs that are hard to diagnose. Moreover, scaling to more processors requires extensive use of locks, which may impose unnecessary locking overhead for small scale multiprocessor systems. This talk will describe the typical approach and then discuss the alternative approach taken in the DragonFlyBSD network stack. We will give an overview of the various protocol threads employed for network I/O processing and the common-case code paths for packet reception and transmission. Additionally, we'll need to make a passing reference to DragonFlyBSD's message passing model. This should establish a baseline, allowing us to focus on the recent work by the author to eliminate use of the Big Giant Lock in the performance-critical paths for the TCP and UDP protocols. The decision to constrain this work on the two by far most widely-used transport protocols was made in order to (a) limit the amount of work necessary and (b) explore the effectiveness of the approach on the cases that matter at this point in time.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Edd Barret - Modern Typesetting on BSD
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, typesetting, bsd, edd barrett
  MP3 (1 byte, 33 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 33 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  Edd Barrett will speak about using the BSD Platform as a means of typesetting from a practical standpoint at EuroBSDcon 2008. Edd Barrett does not wish to go into the technicalities of each typesetter, but rather state which are good for certain types of document, and which tools (ports and packages), integrate well with the available typesetters.
  Edd Barrett os a student from the UK, currently on "placement year" as a systems administrator for Bournemouth University. Open Source *NIX has been his platform of choice for many years and he has been using OpenBSD for about 3 years now, simply because it is small, clean, correct and secure. Just recently he has started developing things I want or need for OpenBSD.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Michael Dexter - Zen and the Art of Multiplicity Maintenance: An applied survey of BSD-licensed multiplicity strategies from chroot to mult
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, bsd, michael dexter
  MP3 (1 byte, 38 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 38 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  Many BSD-licensed strategies of various levels of maturity exist to implement multiplicity, herein defined as the introduction of plurality to traditionally singular computing environments via isolation, virtualization, or other method. For example, the chroot utility introduces an additional isolated root execution environment within that of the host; or an emulator provides highly-isolated virtual systems that can run complete native or foreign operating systems. Motivations for multiplicity vary, but a demonstrable desire exists for users to obtain root or run a foreign binary or operating system. We propose a hands-on survey of portable and integrated BSD-licensed multiplicity strategies applicable to the FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD and NetBSD operating systems on the i386 architecture. We will also address three oft-coupled disciplines: software storage devices, the installation of operating system and userlands in multiplicity environments plus the management of select multiplicity environments. Finally we will comment on each strategies potential limits of isolation, compatibility, independence and potential overhead in comparison to traditional systems. Keywords: multiplicity, virtualization, chroot, jail, hypervisor, xen, compat.
  Michael Dexter has used Unix systems since 1991 and BSD-licensed multiplicity strategies for over five years. He is the Program Manager at the BSD Fund and Project Manager of the BSD.lv Project.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Nick Barkas - Dynamic memory allocation for dirhash in UFS2
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, ufs2, nick barkas
  MP3 (1 byte, 32 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 32 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  Hello My name is Nick Barkas. I'm a master's student studying scientific computing at Kungliga Tekniska hgskolan (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. I have just begun work on a Google Summer of Code project with FreeBSD: Dynamic memory allocation for dirhash in UFS2 . I would like to present my results from this project at EuroBSDCon this year. This project is very much a work in progress now so it is a bit difficult to summarize what I would ultimately present. I will try to describe an outline, though. First I will give background information on dirhash: an explanation of the directory data structure in UFS2, how directory lookups in this structure necessitate a linear search, and how dirhash speeds these lookups up without having to change anything about the directory data structure. Next I will explain the current limitation that dirhash's maximum memory use must be manually specified by administrators, or left at a small conservative default of 2MB. I will explain some different methods I will have explored to try and make this maximum memory limit dynamically increase and decrease as the system has more or less free memory, and which method I will have ultimately settled on and implemented. Then I'll present some test results of performance of operations on very large directories with and without dynamic memory allocation enabled for dirhash. Next I will talk about how speed gains from dirhash are limited by the fact that the hash tables exist only in memory and must be recreated after each system boot, as big directories are scanned for the first time, or even have to be recreated for a directory that has not been scanned in some time if its dirhash has been discarded to free memory. These problems can be eliminated by using an on-disk index for directory entries. I will talk about some of the challenges of implementing on-disk indexing, such as remaining backwards compatible with older versions of UFS2 and interoperating properly with softupdates. Then, if my SoC project has permitted me time to work on this aspect of it, I will explain some possible methods for adding directory indexing to UFS2 that meets these challenges, and which of those ideas I will have implemented. Finally I will present results of some benchmarks on this filesystem with indices, and compare to performance with dirhash, and with no indices or dirhashes.
  Keywords: dirhash, ufs2, filesystems, performance tuning

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Paul Richards - eXtreme Programming: FreeBSD a case study
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, extreme programming, paul richards
  MP3 (1 byte, 54 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 54 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  Traditional project management methodologies are typically based on the waterfall model where there are distinct phases: requirements capture, design, implementation, testing, delivery. Once a project has moved on to the next phase there is no going back. The end result is often a late project that no-one wants anymore because the requirements have fundamentally changed by the time the project is delivered.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Hauke Fath - Managing BSD desktop clients - Fencing in the herd
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, bsd, desktop, hauke fath
  MP3 (1 byte, 50 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 50 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  The members of the BSD family have traditionally prospered off the desktop, as operating systems on servers and embedded systems. The advent of MacOS X has marked a change, and moved the desktop more into focus. Modern desktop systems create a richer software landscape, with more diverse requirements, than their server counterparts. User demands, software package interdependencies and frequent security issues result in a change rate that can put a considerable load on the admin staff. Without central management tools, previously identical installations diverge quickly. This paper looks at concepts and strategies for managing tens to hundreds of modern, Unix-like desktop clients. The available management tools range from simple, image-based software distribution, mainly used for setting up uniform clients, to "intelligent" rule-based engines capable of search-and-replace operations on configuration files. We will briefly compare their properties and limitations, then take a closer look at Radmind, a suite for file level administration of Unix clients. Radmind has been in use in the Institute of Telecommunication at Technische Universitt Darmstadt for over three years, managing NetBSD and Debian Linux clients in the labs as well as faculty members' machines. We will explore the Radmind suite's underlying concepts and functionality. In order to see how the concept holds up, we will discuss real-world scenarios from the system life-cycle of Installation, configuration changes, security updates, component updates, and system upgrades.
  Hauke Fath works as a systems administrator for the Institut fr Nachrichtentechnik (telecommunication) at Technische Universitt Darmstadt. He has been using NetBSD since 1994, when he first booted a NetBSD 1.0A kernel on a Macintosh SE/30. NetBSD helped shaping his career by causing a slow drift from application programmer's work towards systems and network administration. Hauke Fath holds a MS in Physics and became a NetBSD developer in late 2006.
  Keywords: Managing Unix desktop clients, software distribution, tripwire

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Joerg Sonnenberger - Sleeping beauty - NetBSD on Modern Laptops
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, netbsd, laptops, joerg sonnenberger
  MP3 (1 byte, 54 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 54 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  This paper discusses the NetBSD Power Management Framework (PMF) and related changes to the kernel. The outlined changes allow NetBSD to support essential functions like suspend-to-RAM on most post-Y2K X86 machines. They are also the fundation for intelligent handling of device activity by enabling devices on-demand. This work is still progressing. Many of the features will be available in the up-coming NetBSD 5.0 release The NetBSD kernel is widely regarded to be one of the cleanest and most portable Operating System kernels available. For various reasons it is also assumed that NetBSD only runs well on older hardware. In the summer of 2006 Charles Hannum, one of the founders of NetBSD, left with a long mail mentioning as important issues the lack of proper power management and suspendto- RAM support. One year later, Jared D. McNeill posted a plan for attacking this issue based on ideas derived from the Windows Driver Model. This plan would evolve into the new NetBSD Power Management Framework (PMF for short).

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Brooks Davis - Isolating cluster jobs for performance and predictability
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, cluster, brooks davis
  MP3 (1 byte, 51 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 51 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  The Aerospace Corporation operates a federally funded research and development center in support of national-security, civil and commercial space programs. Many of our 2400+ engineers use a variety of computing technologies to support their work. Applications range from small models which are easily handled by desktops to parameter studies involving thousands of cpu hours and traditional, large scale parallel codes such as computational fluid dynamics and molecular modeling applications. Our primary resources used to support these large applications are computing clusters. Our current primary cluster, the Fellowship cluster consists of 352 dual-processor nodes with a total of 14xx cores. Two additional clusters, beginning at 150 dual-processor nodes each are being constructed to augment Fellowship. As in In any multiuser computing environment with limited resources, user competition for resources is a significant burden. Users want everything they need to do their job, right now. Unfortunately, other users may need those resources at the same time. Thus, systems to arbitrate this resource contention are necessary. On Fellowship we have deployed the Sun Grid Engine scheduler which scheduled batch jobs across the nodes. In the next section we discuss the performance problems that can occur when sharing resources in a high performance computing cluster. We then discuss range of possibilities to address these problems. We then explain the solutions we are investigating and describe our experiments with them. We then conclude with a discussion of future work.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Russel Sutherland - UTORvpn: A BSD based VPN service for the masses
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, vpn, russel sutherland
  MP3 (1 byte, 52 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 52 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  The University of Toronto is a large educational institutional with over 70,000 students and 10,000 staff and faculty. For the past three years, we have developed and implemented a ubiquitous VPN service, based up on OpenVPN and FreeBSD. The service has over 3000 active customers, with up to 35 simultaneous users. The system supports, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista/2000 clients. Tools have been developed to create a central CA which enables users to log in to a secure server and get their customized client, certificates and configuration. The NSIS installer is used to generate the customized windows installers. Similar packages are generated for the various Unix based clients. Additional WWW/PHP based tools, have been developed to monitor and log usage of the service, using standard graphs, alarms for excessive use and a certificate revocation mechanism. The system has been integrated into the local identity management system (Kerberos/LDAP) in order to authorize and authenticate users upon initiation and per session usage. All code is Open Source and freely available.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - George Neville-Neil - Four years of summer of code
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, google soc, george neville-neil
  MP3 (1 byte, 27 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 27 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  The Google Summer of Code is a program designed to provide students with real world experience contributing to open source projects during the summer break in university studies. Each year Google selects a number of open source projects to act as mentoring organizations. Students are invited to submit project proposals for the open source projects that are most interesting to them. FreeBSD was one of the projects selected to participate in the inaugural Summer of Code in 2005 and we have participated each year since then. Over the past 4 years a total of 79 students have participated in the program and it has become a very significant source of new committers to FreeBSD. This talk will examine in detail the selection criteria for projects, the impact that successful projects have had, and some suggestions for how we can better leverage this program in the future.

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Anttii Kantee - Converting kernel file systems to services
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, anttii kantee
  MP3 (1 byte, 55 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 55 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  ABSD/UNIX operating system is traditionally split into two pieces: the kernel and userspace. Historically the reasons for this were clear: the UNIX kernel was a simple entity. However, over time the kernel has grown more and more complex. Currently, most of the same functionality is available both in userspace and the kernel, but under different names. Examples include synchronization routines and threading support. For instance, to lock a mutex in the NetBSD kernel, the call is mutex_enter(), while in userspace the routine which does exactly the same thing is known as pthread_mutex_enter(). Taking another classic example, a BSD style OS has malloc()/free() available both in userspace and the kernel, but with different linkage (the kernel malloc interface is currently being widely deprecated, though). This imposes a completely arbitrary division between the kernel and userspace. Most functionality provided by an opearating system should be treated as a service instead of explicitly pinning it down as a userspace daemon or a kernel driver. Currently, due to the arbitrarily difference in programming interface names, functionality must be explicitly ported between the kernel and userspace if it is to run in one or the other environment. By unifying the environments where possible, the arbitrary division is weakened and porting between these environments becomes simpler.
  Antti Kantee has been a NetBSD developer for many many moons. He has managed to work on quite a few bits and pieces of a BSD system: userland utilities, the pkgsrc packaging system, networking, virtual memory, device drivers, hardware support and file systems.
  See also http://www.netbsd.org/docs/puffs/rump.htm

• EuroBSDCon 2008 - Matthieu Herrb - Input handling in wscons and X.Org
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 22 October 2008
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, wscons, x.org, matthieu herrb
  MP3 (1 byte, 57 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 57 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)
  This talk will present the different layers that handle input, from the key that gets pressed or the mouse motion to the applications, all the way through the kernel drivers, X drivers and libraries, in the case of the OpenBSD/NetBSD wscons driver and the current and future X.Org server. It will cover stuff like keyboard mappings, touch-screen calibration, multi-pointer X or input coordinates transformations. It will show some problems of current implementations and try to show how current evolutions can solve them.
  Matthieu Herrb is maintaing X on OpenBSD. I've been using X on various systems (SunOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS X,...) since 1989. He has been a member of the XFree86 Core Team for a short period in 2003 and is now a member of the X.Org Foundation BoD. Matthieu Herrb works at LAAS a research laborarory of the French National Research Agency (CNRS) both on robotics and network security.

• EuroBSDCon 2007 Papers
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 05 October 2007
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2007, papers
  Pawel Jakub - FreeBSD/ZFS - last word in operating/file systems (337 Kb), Stephen Borrill - Building products with NetBSD - thin-clients (407 Kb), John P Hartmann - CMS Pipelines Explained (118 Kb), Soren Straarup - An ARM from shoulder to hand (307 Kb), Brooks Davis - Building clusters with FreeBSD (2.2 Mb), Steven Murdoch - Hot or Not: Fingerprinting hosts through clock skew (6.1 Mb), Brooks Davis - Using FreeBSD to Promote Open Source Development Methods (989 Kb), Sam Leffler - Long Distance Wireless (for Emerging Regions) (19 Mb), Antti Kantee - ReFUSE: Userspace FUSE Reimplementation Using puffs (102 Kb), Yvan VanHullebus - NETASQ and BSD: a success story (2.4 Mb), Ryan Bickhart - Transparent TCP-to-SCTP Translation Shim Layer (692 Kb), Pierre Yves Ritschard - Load Balancing (23 Kb), John P Hartmann - Real Men's Pipes - When UNIX meets the mainframe mindset (382 Kb), Claudio Jeker - Routing on OpenBSD (1.3 Mb), Marc Balmer - Supporting Radio Clocks in OpenBSD (304 Kb), Peter Hansteen - Firewalling with OpenBSD's PF packet filter (531 Kb), Simon L Nielsen - The FreeBSD Security Officer function (251 Kb), Robert Watson - FreeBSD Advanced Security Features (152 Kb), Ryan Bickhart - Transparent TCP-to-SCTP Translation Shim Layer (491 Kb), Kirk Mckusick - A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem (145 Kb), George Neville-Neil - Network Protocol Testing in FreeBSD and in General (251 Kb), Sam Smith - Fighting "Technical fires" (1.4 Mb), Marko Zec - Network stack virtualization for FreeBSD 7.0 (401 Kb), Isaac Levy - FreeBSD jail(8) Overview, the Secure Virtual Server (120 Mb)
  EuroBSDCon 2007 Papers

• Andre Opperman - The papers I write for EuroBSDCon 05
  Source: EuroBSDCon
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2005, paper, freebsd, networking, andre opperman
  Optimizing the FreeBSD IP and TCP Stack (1 Mb), New Networking Features in FreeBSD 6 (92 Kb)
  The papers I write for EuroBSDCon 05 on New Networking Feature in FreeBSD 6.0 and Optimizing FreeBSD IP and TCP in 7-CURRENT

• The presentation I gave at SUCON 04 (115 Kb)
  Source: Andre Opperman
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: sucon, presentation, freebsd, networking, andre opperman
  The presentation I gave at SUCON 04 on 2nd September 2004 about enhancements/changes in FreeBSD 5.3 Networking Stack.

• AsiaBSDCon 2008 Paper List
  Source: AsiaBSDCon
  Added: 08 April 2008
  Tags: asiabsdcon, asiabsdcon2008
  Using FreeBSD to Promote Open Source Development Methods, Brooks Davis, Michael AuYeung, Mark Thomas (The Aerospace Corporation) (483 Kb), OpenBSD Network Stack Internals, Claudio Jeker (The OpenBSD Project) (410 Kb), Tracking FreeBSD in a Commercial Setting, M. Warner Losh (Cisco Systems, Inc.) (94 Kb), Send and Receive of File System Protocols: Userspace Approach With puffs, Antti Kantee (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland) (126 Kb), GEOM --- in Infrastructure We Trust, Pawel Jakub Dawidek (The FreeBSD Project) (91 Kb), Reducing Lock Contention in a Multi-Core System, Randall Stewart (Cisco Systems, Inc.) (72 Kb), PC-BSD: FreeBSD on the Desktop, Matt Olander (iXsystems) (6.4 Mb), Logical Resource Isolation in the NetBSD Kernel, Kristaps Dzonsons (Centre for Parallel Computing, Swedish Royal Institute of Technology) (97 Kb), Whole of the proceedings (9.3 Mb), Gaols: Implementing Jails Under the kauth Framework, Christoph Badura (The NetBSD Foundation) (92 Kb), Cover page (467 Kb), Sleeping Beauty --- NetBSD on Modern Laptops, Jorg Sonnenberger, Jared D. McNeill (The NetBSD Foundation) (87 Kb), A Portable iSCSI Initiator, Alistair Crooks (The NetBSD Foundation) (341 Kb), BSD implementations of XCAST6, Yuji IMAI, Takahiro KUROSAWA, Koichi SUZUKI, Eiichi MURAMOTO, Katsuomi HAMAJIMA, Hajimu UMEMOTO, and Nobuo KAWAGUTI (XCAST fan club, Japan) (526 Kb)
  Papers of the AsiaBSDCon 2007

• AsiaBSDCon 2007 Paper/Slides List
  Source: AsiaBSDCon
  Added: 17 March 2007
  Tags: asiabsdcon, asiabsdcon2007
  SHISA: The Mobile IPv6/NEMO BS Stack Implementation Current Status, Keiichi Shima (Internet Initiative Japan Inc., Japan), Koshiro Mitsuya, Ryuji Wakikawa (Keio University, Japan), Tsuyoshi Momose (NEC Corporation, Japan), Keisuke Uehara (Keio University, Japan) [paper] (311 Kb), An ISP Perspective, jail(8) Virtual Private Servers, Isaac Levy (NYC*BUG/LESMUUG, USA) [paper] (140 Kb), A NetBSD-based IPv6 NEMO Mobile Router, Jean Lorchat, Koshiro Mitsuya, Romain Kuntz (Keio University, Japan) [paper] (412 Kb), Whole of the Proceedings (6.5 Mb), Cover page (588 Kb), Porting the ZFS File System to the FreeBSD Operating System, Pawel Jakub Dawidek (pjd at FreeBSD.org, Poland) [slides] (278 Kb), Implementation and Evaluation of the Dual Stack Mobile IPv6, Koshiro Mitsuya, Ryuji Wakikawa, Jun Murai (Keio University, Japan) [paper] (1071 Kb), puffs - Pass to Userspace Framework File System, Antti Kantee (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland) [slides] (116 Kb), Reflections on Building a High Performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD, Brooks Davis (The Aerospace Corporation/brooks at FreeBSD.org, USA) [paper] (1371 Kb), Nsswitch Development: Nss-modules and libc Separation and Caching, Michael A Bushkov (Southern Federal University/bushman at FreeBSD.org, Russia) [paper] (32 Kb), Bluffs: BSD Logging Updated Fast File System, Stephan Uphoff (Yahoo!, Inc./ups at FreeBSD.org, USA) [slides] (601 Kb), Security Measures in OpenSSH, Damien Miller (djm at openbsd.org, Australia) [paper] (97 Kb), Porting the ZFS File System to the FreeBSD Operating System, Pawel Jakub Dawidek (pjd at FreeBSD.org, Poland) [paper] (96 Kb), An ISP Perspective, jail(8) Virtual Private Servers, Isaac Levy (NYC*BUG/LESMUUG, USA) [slides] (20 Mb), Support for Radio Clocks in OpenBSD, Marc Balmer (mbalmer at openbsd.org, Switzerland) [paper] (86 Kb), How the FreeBSD Project Works, Robert N M Watson (University of Cambridge/rwatson at FreeBSD.org, United Kingdom) [paper] (328 Kb), puffs - Pass to Userspace Framework File System, Antti Kantee (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland) [paper] (68 Kb)
  Slides and papers of the AsiaBSDCon 2007

• Robert Watson's Slides from EuroBSDCon 2004
  Source: Robert Watson
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2004, slides, trustedbsd, freebsd, mac, robert watson
  TrustedBSD MAC Framework on FreeBSD and Darwin (270 Kb)
  Robert Watson will describe the design and application of the TrustedBSD MAC Framework, a flexible kernel security framework developed on FreeBSD, and recently experimentally ported to Apple's Darwin operating system. The MAC Framework permits loadable access control kernel modules to be loaded, modifying the security behavior of the operating system, including SEBSD, a port of the SELinux FLASK/TE security model to FreeBSD.

• Robert Watson's Slides from UKUUG LISA 2006
  Source: Robert Watson
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: ukuug, slides, openbsm, trustedbsd, freebsd, robert watson
  CAPP-Compliant Security Event Audit System for Mac OS X and FreeBSD (UKUUG LISA 2006). (199 Kb)
  UKUUG LISA 2006 took place in Durham, UK in March, 2006. On this page, you can find my slides from this conference.
  OpenBSM is a BSD-licensed implementation of Sun's Basic Security Module (BSM) API and file format, and is the foundation of the TrustedBSD audit implementation for FreeBSD. This talk will cover the requirements, design, and implementation of audit support for FreeBSD. Security audit support provides detailed logging of security-relevant events, and meets the requirements of the CAPP Common Criteria protection profile.

• Robert Watson's Slides from EuroBSDCon 2006 and FreeBSD Developer Summit
  Source: Robert Watson
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2006, robert watson
  How the FreeBSD Project Works (EuroBSDCon 2006 Full Conference) (4.4 Mb), TrustedBSD presentation on Audit and priv(9) (Developer Summit) (166 Kb)
  EuroBSDCon 2006 took place in Milan, Italy, and not only offered excellent food on a flexible schedule, but also an interesting array of talks on work spanning the BSD's. On this page, you can find my slides from the FreeBSD developer summit and full conference.
  Status report on the TrustedBSD Project: introduction and status regarding Audit, plus a TODO list; introduction to the priv(9) work recently merged to 7.x.
  The FreeBSD Project is one of the oldest and most successful open source operating system projects, seeing wide deployment across the IT industry. From the root name servers, to top tier ISPs, to core router operating systems, to firewalls, to embedded appliances, you can't use a networked computer for ten minutes without using FreeBSD dozens of times. Part of FreeBSD's reputation for quality and reliability comes from the nature of its development organization--driven by a hundreds of highly skilled volunteers, from high school students to university professors. And unlike most open source projects, the FreeBSD Project has developers who have been working on the same source base for over twenty years. But how does this organization work? Who pays the bandwidth bills, runs the web servers, writes the documentation, writes the code, and calls the shots? And how can developers in a dozen time zones reach agreement on the time of day, let alone a kernel architecture? This presentation will attempt to provide, in 45 minutes, a brief if entertaining snapshot into what makes FreeBSD run.

• Robert Watson's Slides from BSDCan 2006 and FreeBSD Developer Summit
  Source: Robert Watson
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2006, notes, devsummit, robert watson
  SMPng Network Stack Update (Developer Summit) (91 Kb), How the FreeBSD Project Works (BSDCan 2006 Full Conference) (4.4 Mb Kb), Notes from the 10 May 2006 Meeting of the Network Stack Cabal (Developer Summit) (72 Kb), TrustedBSD Project Update (Developer Summit) (120 Kb)
  As usual, Dan Langille ran an excellent BSDCan conference. On this page, you can find my slides from the developer summit and full conference, excluding the contents of the WIPs, for which I don't have permission to redistribute the slides.

• Robert Watson's Slides from EuroBSDCon 2005
  Source: Robert Watson
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2005, slides, freebsd, smp, robert watson, poul-henning kamp, ed maste
  Introduction to Multithreading and Multiprocessing in the FreeBSD SMPng Network Stack (370 Kb)
  EuroBSDCon 2005 took place in Basel, Switzerland in November, 2005. Due to an injury, I was unable to attend the conference itself, and my talks were presented in absentia by Poul-Henning Kamp and Ed Maste, who have my greatest appreciation!
  The FreeBSD SMPng Project has spent the past five years redesigning and reimplementing SMP support for the FreeBSD operating system, moving from a Giant-locked kernel to a fine-grained locking implementation with greater kernel threading and parallelism. This paper introduces the FreeBSD SMPng Project, its architectural goals and implementation approach. It then explores the impact of SMPng on the FreeBSD network stack, including strategies for integrating SMP support into the network stack, locking approaches, optimizations, and challenges.

• Robert Watson's Slides from BSDCan 2004
  Source: Robert Watson
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2004, slides, trustedbsd, freebsd, robert watson
  TrustedBSD: Trusted Operating System Features for BSD (277 Kb)
  BSDCan 2004 took place at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada. On this page, you can find my slides from the conference.
  Robert Watson will describe a variety of pieces of work done as part of the TrustedBSD Project, including the TrustedBSD MAC Framework, Audit facilities for FreeBSD, as well as supporting infrastructure work such as GEOM/GBDE, UFS2, OpenPAM. He will also discuss how certification and evaluation play into feature selection, design, and documentation.

• Robert Watson's Slides from AsiaBSDCon 2004
  Source: Robert Watson
  Added: 14 January 2007
  Tags: asiabsdcon, asiabsdcon2004, robert watson
  AsiaBSDCon 2004 BSD (FreeBSD) BoF session (1.4 Mb), Extensible Kernel Security through the TrustedBSD MAC Framework. (135 Kb)
  AsiaBSDCon 2004 took place in Taipei, Taiwan, in March 2004, and was hosted by Academia Sinica.

• A Tale of Four Kernels
  Source: Diomidis Spinellis
  Added: 17 May 2008
  Tags: freebsd, linux, solaris, windows, article, kernel, diomidis spinellis
  Diomidis Spinellis. A tale of four kernels. In Wilhem Schfer, Matthew B. Dwyer, and Volker Gruhn, editors, ICSE '08: Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 381-390, New York, May 2008. Association for Computing Machinery. , Diomidis Spinellis. A tale of four kernels. In Wilhem Schfer, Matthew B. Dwyer, and Volker Gruhn, editors, ICSE '08: Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 381-390, New York, May 2008. Association for Computing Machinery.
  The FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Solaris, and Windows operating systems have kernels that provide comparable facilities. Interestingly, their code bases share almost no common parts, while their development processes vary dramatically. We analyze the source code of the four systems by collecting metrics in the areas of file organization, code structure, code style, the use of the C preprocessor, and data organization. The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many different metrics, four systems developed using wildly different processes score comparably. This allows us to posit that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.

• New York City BSD Con 2008
  Source: New York City *BSD User Group
  Added: 24 November 2008
  Tags: nycbsdcon2008, nycbsdcon, presentation
  Julio M. Merino Vidal: An introduction to the Automated Testing Framework (ATF) for NetBSD. (570 Kb, 18 pages), Mike Silbersack: Detecting TCP regressions with tcpdiff. (88 Kb, 28 pages), Metthew Dillon: The HAMMER File System. (820 Kb, 16 pages), Kurt Miller: OpenBSD's Position Independent Executables (PIE) Implementation. (21 pages), Adrian Chadd: High-throughput concurrent disk IO in FreeBSD. (197 Kb, 92 pages), Anders Magnusson: Design and Implementation of the Portable C Compiler. (123 Kb, 29 pages), Jason L Wright: When Hardware Is Wrong, or "They can Fix It In Software". (1.7 Mb, 22 pages)
  Slides of presentations given at New York City BSD Conference 2008.

• User Interfaces and How People Think
  Source: New York City *BSD User Group
  Added: 10 March 2008
  Tags: nycbug, presentation, user interfaces
  Slides (2.7 Mb, 24 pages), MP3 version (9 Mb, 78 minutes)
  

  "User Interfaces and How People Think" will introduce concepts of designing software for different users by observing how they think about and do what they do. While much of design today focuses on the front-end of computer systems, there is opportunity to innovate in every area where a human interacts with software.

  Bio: Jeffery Mau is a user experience designer with the leading business and technology consulting firm Sapient. He has helped clients create great customer experiences in the financial services, education, entertainment and telecommunications industries. With a passion for connecting people with technology, Jeff specializes in Information Architecture and Business Strategy. Jeff holds a Masters in Design from the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, Illinois.

• SSARES
  Source: New York City *BSD User Group
  Added: 11 January 2008
  Tags: nycbug, presentation, ipv6, gene cronk
  Paper (443 Kb, 10 pages), MP3 version (7 Mb, 67 minutes)
  

  SSARES: Secure Searchable Automated Remote Email Storage - A usable, secure email system on a remote untrusted server

  The increasing centralization of networked services places user data at considerable risk. For example, many users store email on remote servers rather than on their local disk. Doing so allows users to gain the benefit of regular backups and remote access, but it also places a great deal of unwarranted trust in the server. Since most email is stored in plaintext, a compromise of the server implies the loss of confidentiality and integrity of the email stored therein. Although users could employ an end-to-end encryption scheme (e.g., PGP), such measures are not widely adopted, require action on the sender side, only provide partial protection (the email headers remain in the clear), and prevent the users from performing some common operations, such as server-side search.

  To address this problem, we present Secure Searchable Automated Remote Email Storage (SSARES), a novel system that offers a practical approach to both securing remotely stored email and allowing privacy-preserving search of that email collection. Our solution encrypts email (the headers, body, and attachments) as it arrives on the server using public-key encryption. SSARES uses a combination of Identity Based Encryption and Bloom Filters to create a searchable index. This index reveals little information about search keywords and queries, even against adversaries that compromise the server. SSARES remains largely transparent to both the sender and recipient. However, the system also incurs significant costs, primarily in terms of expanded storage requirements. We view our work as a starting point toward creating privacy-friendly hosted services.

  Angelos Keromytis is an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, and director of the Network Security Laboratory. He received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Crete, Greece, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Computer and Information Science (CIS) Department, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and co-author of more than 100 papers on refereed conferences and journals, and has served on over 40 conference program committees. He is an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Information and Systems Security (TISSEC). He recently co-authored a book on using graphics cards for security, and is a co-founder of StackSafe Inc. His current research interests revolve around systems and network security, and cryptography.

• MeetBSD 2008 in California - Presentation
  Source: MeetBSD
  Added: 19 November 2008
  Tags: meetbsd, meetbsd2008, freebsd, presentations
  FreeBSD Foundation Update & Recognition by Robert Watson (3.2 Mb, 8 pages), BSD Certification by Dru Lavigne (80 Kb, 19 pages), Crypto Acceleration by Philip Paeps (256 Kb, 20 pages), "Help, my system is slow!" Profiling tools, tips and tricks by Kris Kennaway (172 Kb, 29 pages), Embedding FreeBSD by M. Warner Losh (685 Kb, 31 pages), Isilon and FreeBSD by Zach Loafman (136 Kb, 25 pages), Isolating Cluster Jobs for Performance and Predictability by Brooks Davis (900 Kb, 24 pages), PC-BSD 7 - A Developer's Perspective by Kris Moore (580 Kb, 45 pages), FreeBSD Network Stack Performance - Optimizations for Modern Hardware by Robert Watson (5.5 Mb, 43 pages), A closer look at the ZFS file system by Pawel Jakub Dawidek (470 Kb, 45 pages)
  MeetBSD 2008 at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to celebrate FreeBSD's 15th Anniversary!

• MeetBSD 2007 - Presentations and recordings
  Source: MeetBSD
  Added: 28 May 2008
  Tags: meetbsd, meetbsd2007
  Slawomir Zak - DTrace - Monitoring i strojenie systemu w XXI wieku (546 Mb), Brooks Davis - Reflections on Building a High-Performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD (401 Mb), Christian Brüffer - Protecting your Privacy with FreeBSD and Tor (416 Kb, 34 Pages), Rafal Jaworowski - FreeBSD do zabudowy, czyli nie tylko pecety (600 Kb, 21 pages), Dominik Hamera, Jakub Klausa - Nowoczesne rozwiazania bezprzewodowe w systemie FreeBSD (165 Mb), Christian Brüffer - Protecting your Privacy with FreeBSD and Tor (409 Kb), Matt Olander - PC-BSD: FreeBSD on the Desktop (272 Mb), Adam Bartman, Rafal Grzebyk - Nowoczesna infrastruktura telefoniczna w oparciu o systemy z rodziny BSD (105 Mb), Pawel Solyga - Meet BSD projects from Google Summer of Code 2007 (6.0 Mb), Brooks Davis - Reflections on Building a High-Performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD (1.7 Mb, 25 Pages), Rafal Jaworowski - FreeBSD do zabudowy, czyli nie tylko pecety (638 Mb), Philip Paeps - Detangling and debugging: friends in unexpected places (162 Mb), Pawel Solyga - Meet BSD projects from Google Summer of Code 2007 (3.7 Mb, 71 Pages), Pawel Solyga - Meet BSD projects from Google Summer of Code 2007 (308 Mb), Adam Bartman, Rafal Grzebyk - Nowoczesna infrastruktura telefoniczna w oparciu o systemy z rodziny BSD (3.9 Mb, 71 Pages), Philip Paeps - Detangling and debugging: friends in unexpected places (495 Kb, 53 Pages), Kris Kennaway - New features and improvements in FreeBSD 7 (336 Kb, 37 pages), Slawomir Zak - DTrace - Monitoring i strojenie systemu w XXI wieku (1.1 Mb, 35 Pages), Kris Kennaway - New features and improvements in FreeBSD 7 (564 Mb)
  MeetBSD 2007 at the Conference Centre-PWSBiA Congress in Warsaw

• Manuel Trujillo - FreeBSD para usuarios de GNU/Linux (32 Kb)
  Source: BSDCon Spain
  Added: 27 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcon-barcelona, spanish, presentation, freebsd, linux, manuel trujillo
  

  Charla sobre las diferencias que puede encontrar un usuario de un sistema operativo GNU/Linux cuando accede a un sistema operativo FreeBSD, y sugerencias superar la posible desorientación.

• Jordi Prats - Uso de OpenBSD en dispositivos empotrados (1.8 Mb, 44 pages)
  Source: BSDCon Spain
  Added: 27 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcon-barcelona, spanish, presentation, openbsd, embedded, jordi prats
  

  Los sistemas empotrados gracias a un menor consumo energético y unas dimensiones reducidas, a costa de ciertas limitaciones del hardware, permiten su uso en multitud de entornos. En esta presentación veremos como usarlos con OpenBSD y sus posibles aplicaciones.

• Jesús Rodriguez - SIP y VozIP con FreeBSD (527 Kb, 40 pages)
  Source: BSDCon Spain
  Added: 27 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcon-barcelona, spanish, presentation, asterisk, openser, freebsd, sip, voip, jesus rodriguez
  

  Repaso a las diferentes aplicaciones y servicios relacionados con SIP y VozIP que pueden usarse en FreeBSD. Entre estas apliaciones destacan OpenSER y Asterisk, ya que usados de forma conjunta pueden ofrecer una larga lista de servicios de forma rápida, segura y escalable.

• FreeBSD Security Officer funktionen
  Source: AArhus Unix Users Group
  Added: 15 January 2007
  Tags: aauug, presentation, danish, freebsd, security officer, simon l nielsen
  PDF (danish) (211 Kb)
  "FreeBSD Security Officer funktionen" at the AAUUG, AAUUG, 22 August 2006 by Simon L. Nielsen (FreeBSD Deputy Security Officer)

• FreeBSD Security Officer funktionen (210 Kb)
  Source: BSD UNIX bruger gruppe i Danmark
  Added: 15 January 2007
  Tags: aauug, presentation, danish, freebsd, security officer, simon l nielsen
  "FreeBSD Security Officer funktionen" at the BSD-DK, 26 August 2006 by Simon L. Nielsen (FreeBSD Deputy Security Officer)

• FreeBSD ports Erwin Lansing
  Source: OpenFest
  Added: 15 January 2007
  Tags: openfest, openfest2006, presentation, freebsd, port manager, erwin lansing
  PDF (128 Kb)
  Case study : managing a worldwide open source project: FreeBSD port manager

• Daniel Braniss
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 28 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, presentation, iscsi, daniel braniss
  PDF file (1.4 Mb, 30 pages)
  

  iSCSI

  not an Apple appliance.

  iSCSI is not an Apple appliance.

  The i in iSCSI stands for internet, some say for insecure, personally I like to think interesting. I'll try to share the road followed from RFC-3720 to the actual working driver, the challenges, the frustrations.

• Scott Ullrich, Chris Buechler - pfSense Tutorial
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 28 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, tutorial, freebsd, pfsense, scott ullrich, chris buechler
  PDF file (4.1 Kb, 91 pages)
  

  pfSense Tutorial

  From Zero to Hero with pfSense

  pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution. pfSense is a popular project with more than 1 million downloads since its inception, and proven in countless installations ranging from small home networks protecting a PC and an Xbox to large corporations, universities and other organizations protecting thousands of network devices.

  This tutorial is being presented by the founders of the pfSense project, Chris Buechler and Scott Ullrich.

  The session will start with an introduction to the project, hardware sizing and selection, installation, firewalling concepts and basic configuration, and continue to cover all the most popular features of the system. Common usage scenarios, deployment considerations, step by step configuration guidance, and best practices will be covered for each feature. Most configurations will be demonstrated in a live lab environment.

  Attendees are assumed to have basic knowledge of TCP/IP and firewalling concepts, however no in-depth knowledge in these areas or prior knowledge of pfSense or FreeBSD is necessary.

• Rafal Jaworowski - FreeBSD Embedded Report
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 26 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, devsummit, devsummit2008, freebsd, embedded, rafal jaworowski
  PDF file (58 Kb, 6 pages)
  FreeBSD Embedded Report

• Robert Watson - TCP SMP Scalability
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 26 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, devsummit, devsummit2008, freebsd, smp, robert watson
  PDF file (70 Kb, 8 pages)
  TCP SMP Scalability

• Erwin Lansing - What's happening in the world of ports and portmgr
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 24 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, devsummit, devsummit2008, freebsd, portmgr, erwin lansing
  PDF file (146 Kb, 14 pages)
  What's happening in the world of ports and portmgr

• Kern Sibbald - Bacula
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 26 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, bacula, kern sibbald
  PDF file (505 Kb, 30 pages)
  

  Bacula

  The Open Source Enterprise Backup Solution

  The Bacula project started in January 2000 with several goals, one of which was the ability to backup any client from a Palm to a mainframe computer. Bacula is available under a GPL license.

  Bacula uses several distinct components, each communicating via TCP/IP, to achieve a very scalable and robust solution to backups.

  Kern is one of the original project founders and still one of the most productive Bacula developers.

• Warner Losh - FreeBSD/mips
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 26 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, freebsd, mips, embedded, warner losh
  PDF file (1.3 Mb, 19 pages)
  

  FreeBSD/mips

  Embedding FreeBSD

  FreeBSD now runs on the MIPS platform. FreeBSD/mips supports MIPS-32 and MIPS-64 targets, including SMP for multicore support.

  FreeBSD/mips is targeted at the embedded MIPS marketplace. FreeBSD has run on the MIPS platform for many years. Juniper ported FreeBSD to the Mips platform in the late 1990's. However, concern about intellectual property issues kept Juniper from contributing the port back to FreeBSD until recently. The contributed port was a 64-bit mips port.

  In the mean time, many efforts were made to bring FreeBSD to the mips platform. The first substantial effort to bring FreeBSD to the Mips platform was done by Juli Mallet. This effort made it to single user, but never further than that. This effort was abandoned due to a change in Juli's life. The port languished.

  Two years ago at BSDcan, as my involvement with FreeBSD/arm was growing, I tried to rally the troops into doing a FreeBSD/mips port. My efforts resulted in what has been commonly called the "mips2" effort. The name comes from the choice of //depot/projects/mips2 to host the work in perforce. A number of people worked on the earliest versions of the port, but it too languished and seemed destined to suffer the same fate as earlier efforts. Then, two individuals stood up and started working on the port. Wojciech A. Koszek and Oleksandr Tymoshenko pulled in code from the prior efforts. Through their efforts of stabilizing this code, the port to the single user stage and ported it to three different platforms. Others ported it to a few more. Snapshots of this work were released from time to time.

  Cavium Networks picked up one of these snapshots and ported it to their multicore mips64 network processor. Cavium has kindly donated much of their work to the comminuty.

  In December, I started at Cisco systems. My first job was to merge all the divergent variants of FreeBSD/mips and get it into shape to push into the tree. With luck, this should be in the tree before I give my talk.

  In parallel to this, other advances in the embedded support for FreeBSD have been happening as well. I'll talk about new device drivers, new subsystems, and new build tools that help to support the embedded developer.

• Kris Moore - Building self-contained PBIs from Ports (Automagically)
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 26 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, pc-bsd, ports, pbi, kris moore
  PDF file (120 Kb, 26 pages)
  

  Building self-contained PBIs from Ports (Automagically)

  Creating a self-contained application from the ports tree

  PC-BSD provides a user-friendly desktop experience, for experts and casual users alike. PC-BSD is 100% FreeBSD under the hood, while providing desktop essentials, such as a graphical installation system, point-n-click package-management using the PBI system, and easy to use system management tools; All integrated into an easy to use K Desktop Environment (KDE).

  The PBI (Push Button Installer) format is the cornerstone of the PC-BSD desktop, which allows users to install applications in a self-contained format, free from dependency problems, and compile issues that stop most casual users from desktop adoption. The PBI format also provides power and flexibility in user interaction, and scripting support, which allows applications to be fine-tuned to the best possible user experience.

  This talk would go over in some detail our new PBI building system, which converts a FreeBSD port, such as FireFox, into a standalone self-contained PBI installer for PC-BSD desktops.

  The presentation will be divided into two main sections:
  The Push Button Installer (PBI) Format

  • The basics of the PBI format
  • The PBI format construction
  • Add & Remove scripting support within PBI

  Building PBIs from Ports "Auto-magically"

  • The PBI build server & standalone software
  • Module creation & configuration
  • Converting messy ports into PBIs

• John Pertalion - An Open Source Enterprise VPN Solution with OpenVPN and OpenBSD
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 26 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, openbsd, openvpn, john pertalion
  PDF file (127 Kb, 26 pages)
  

  An Open Source Enterprise VPN Solution with OpenVPN and OpenBSD

  Solving the problem

  At Appalachian State University, we utilize an open source VPN to allow faculty, staff and vendors secure access to Appalachian State University's internal network from any location that has an Internet connection. To implement our virtual private network project, we needed a secure VPN that is flexible enough to work with our existing network registration and LDAP authentication systems, has simple client installation, is redundant, allows multiple VPN server instances for special site-to-site tunnels and unique configurations, and can run on multiple platforms. Using OpenVPN running on OpenBSD, we met those requirements and added a distributed administration system that allows select users to allow VPN access to specific computers for external users and vendors without requiring intervention from our network or security personnel. Our presentation will start with a quick overview of OpenVPN and OpenBSD and then detail the specifics of our VPN implementation.

  Dissatisfied with IPSec for road warrior VPN usage we went looking for a better solution. We had hopped that we could find a solution that would run on multiple platforms, was flexible and worked well. We found OpenVPN and have been pleased. Initially we ran it on RHEL. We migrated to OpenBSD for pf functionality and general security concerns. ...and because we like OpenBSD.

  Our presentation will focus on the specifics of our VPN implementation. We will quickly cover the basics of OpenVPN and the most used features of OpenBSD. Moving along we will cover multiple authentication methods, redundancy, running multiple instances, integration with our netreg system, how pf has extended functionality, embedding in appliances, and client configuration. The system has proven helpful with providing vendor access where needed and we'll cover this aspect as well. Time permitting we will cover current enhancement efforts and future plans.

  OpenVPN has been called the "Swiss army knife" of VPN solutions. We hope our presentation leaves participants with that feeling.

• Ivan Voras - "finstall" - the new FreeBSD installer
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 26 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, freebsd, installer, ivan voras
  PDF file (1.1 Mb, 39 pages)
  

  "finstall" - the new FreeBSD installer

  A graphical installer for FreeBSD

  The "finstall" project, sponsored by Google as a Summer of Code 2007 project, is an attempt to create a user-friendly graphical installer for FreeBSD, with enough strong technical features to appeal to the more professional users. A long term goal for it is to be a replacement for sysinstall, and as such should support almost all of the features present in sysinstall, as well as add support for new FreeBSD features such as GEOM, ZFS, etc. This talk will describe the architecture of "finstall" and focus on its lesser known features such as remote installation.

  "finstall" is funded by Google SoC as a possible long-term replacement for sysinstall, as a "LiveCD" with the whole FreeBSD base system on the CD, with X11 and XFCE4 GUI. In the talk I intend to describe what I did so far, and what are the future plans for it. This includes the installer GUI, the backend (which has the potential to become a generic FreeBSD configuration backend) and the assorted tools developed for finstall ("LiveCD" creation scripts). More information on finstall can be found here: http://wiki.freebsd.org/finstall.

• Poul-Henning Kamp - Measured (almost) does Air Traffic Control
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 26 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, air traffic control, scada, poul-henning kamp
  PDF file (7.7 Mb, 46 pages)
  

  Measured (almost) does Air Traffic Control

  Monitoring weird hardware reliably

  The new Danish Air Traffic Control system, CASIMO, prompted the development on a modular and general software platform for data collection, control and monitoring of "weird hardware" of all sorts.

  The talk will present the "measured" daemon, and detail some of the uses it has been put to, as an, admittedly peripheral, component of the ATC system.

  Many "SCADA" systems suffer from lack of usable interfaces for external access to the data. Measured takes the opposite point of view and makes real-time situation available, and accepts control instructions as ASCII text stream over TCP connections. Several examples of how this can be used will be demonstrated.

  Measured will run on any FreeBSD system, but has not been ported to other UNIX variants yet, and it is perfect for that "intelligent house" project of yours.

  I believe I gave a WIP presentation of this about two years ago.

• Chris Lattner - BSD licensed C++ compiler
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 21 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, bsdl, llvm, chris lattner
  PDF file (5.8 Mb, 33 pages)
  

  BSD licensed C++ compiler

  LLVM is a suite of carefully designed open source libraries that implement compiler components (like language front-ends, code generators, aggressive optimizers, Just-In-Time compiler support, debug support, link-time optimization, etc.). The goal of the LLVM project is to build these components in a way that allows them to be combined together to create familiar tools (like a C compiler), interesting new tools (like an OpenGL JIT compiler), and many other things we haven't thought of yet. Because LLVM is under continuous development, clients of these components naturally benefit from improvements in the libraries.

  This talk gives an overview of LLVM's design and approach to compiler construction, and gives several example applications. It describes applications of LLVM technology to llvm-gcc (a C/C++/Objective C compiler based on the GNU GCC front-end), the OpenGL stack in Mac OS/X Leopard, and Clang. Among other things, the Clang+LLVM Compiler provides a fully BSD-Licensed C and Objective-C compiler (with C++ in development) which compiles code several times faster than GCC, produces code that is faster than GCC in many cases, produces better warnings and error messages, and supports many other applications (e.g. static analysis and refactoring).

• Robert Watson - BSDCan 2008 - Closing
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 21 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, robert watson
  PDF file (428 Kb, 55 pages)
  

  Closing

  Beer, prizes, secrets, Works In Progress

  The traditional closing...
  with some new and interesting twists. Sleep in if you must, but don't miss this session.

• Leslie Hawthorn - Google SoC
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 21 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, google, summer of code, leslie hawthorn
  PDF file (2.2 Mb, 44 pages)
  

  Google SoC

  Summer of Code

  In this talk, I will briefly discuss some general ways Google's Open Source Team contributes to the wider community. The rest of the talk will explore some highlights of the Google Summer of Code program, our initiative to get university students involved in Open Source development.

  I will cover the program's inception, lessons learned over time and tips for success in the program for both mentors and students. In particular, the talk will detail some experiences of the *BSD mentoring organizations involved in the program as a case study in successfully managing the program from the Open Source project's perspective. Any Google Summer of Code participants in the audience are welcome and encouraged to chime in with their own insights.

• Pawel Jakub Dawidek - A closer look at the ZFS file system
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 21 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, zfs, freebsd, pawel jakub dawidek
  PDF file (150 Kb, 33 pages)
  

  A closer look at the ZFS file system

  simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity

  SUN's ZFS file system became part of FreeBSD on 6th April 2007. ZFS is a new kind of file system that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use.

  ZFS presents a pooled storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage. Thousands of file systems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all filesystems at all times.

  All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS file system, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS detects it and uses another copy to repair it.

• Rafal Jaworowski - Interfacing embedded FreeBSD with U-Boot
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 21 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, embedded, freebsd, u-boot, rafal jaworowski
  PDF file (300 Kb, 26 pages)
  

  Interfacing embedded FreeBSD with U-Boot

  Working with the de facto standard for an initial level boot loader

  In the embedded world U-Boot is a de facto standard for an initial level boot loader (firmware). It runs on a great number of platforms and architectures, and is open source.

  This talk covers the development work on integrating FreeBSD with U-Boot-based systems. Starting with an overview of differences between booting an all-purpose desktop computer vs. embedded system, FreeBSD booting concepts are explained along with requirements for the underlying firmware.

  Historical attempts to interface FreeBSD with this firmware are mentioned and explanation given on why they failed or proved incomplete. Finally, the recently developed approach to integrate FreeBSD and U-Boot is presented, with implementation details and particular attention on how it's been made architecture and platform independent, and how loader(8) has been bound to it.

• John Baldwin - Introduction to Debugging the FreeBSD Kernel
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 21 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, paper, debugging, freebsd, john baldwin
  paper, PDF file (121 Kb, 15 pages), slides, PDF file (113 Kb, 26 pages)
  

  Introduction to Debugging the FreeBSD Kernel

  Just like every other piece of software, the FreeBSD kernel has bugs. Debugging a kernel is a bit different from debugging a userland program as there is nothing underneath the kernel to provide debugging facilities such as ptrace() or procfs. This paper will give a brief overview of some of the tools available for investigating bugs in the FreeBSD kernel. It will cover the in-kernel debugger DDB and the external debugger kgdb which is used to perform post-mortem analysis on kernel crash dumps.

  Introduction to Debugging the FreeBSD Kernel

  • Basic crash messages, what a crash looks like
    • typical panic() invocation
    • page fault example
  • "live" debugging with DDB
    • stack traces
    • ps
    • deadlock examples
    • show lockchain
    • show sleepchain
    • Adding new DDB commands
  • KGDB
    • inspecting processes and threads
    • working with kernel modules
    • using scripts to extend
  • examining crashdumps using utilities
    • ps, netstat, etc.
  • debugging strategies
    • kernel crashes
    • system hangs

• John Birrell - DTrace for FreeBSD
  Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
  Added: 21 May 2008
  Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, dtrace, freebsd, john birrell
  PDF file (148 Kb, 49 pages)
  

  DTrace for FreeBSD

  What on earth is that system doing?!

  DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing facility originally developed for Solaris that can be used by administrators and developers on live production systems to examine the behavior of both user programs and of the operating system itself. DTrace enables users to explore their system to understand how it works, track down performance problems across many layers of software, or locate the cause of aberrant behavior. DTrace lets users create their own custom programs to dynamically instrument the system and provide immediate, concise answers to arbitrary questions you can f