FreeBSD Multimedia
FreeBSD Multimedia Resources List
Links on this page refer to multimedia resources (podcast, vodcast, audio recordings, video recordings, photos) related to FreeBSD or of interest for FreeBSD 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: bsdcan
BSDCan-2012 Photos - Friday
Photos taken during the Conference on Friday at BSDCan 2012 in Ottawa by Diane Bruce.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 28 May 2012
Tags: 2012, bsdcan, bsdcan2012, photos, diane bruce
BSDCan-2012 Photos - Saturday
Photos taken during both the DevSummit and Conference on Saturday at BSDCan 2012 in Ottawa by Diane Bruce.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 28 May 2012
Tags: 2012, bsdcan, bsdcan2012, photos, diane bruce
BSDCan-2012 Photos - Saturday
Photos taken during both the DevSummit and Conference on Saturday at BSDCan 2012 in Ottawa by Benedict Reuschling.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 28 May 2012
Tags: 2012, bsdcan, bsdcan2012, photos, benedict reuschling
BSDCan-2012 - Michael Dexter - An applied survey of BSD multiplicity and virtualization strategies from chroot to BHyVe
Ever since the University of California, Berkeley CSRG implemented the chroot(8) command and system call in its BSD operating system in 1982, the community-developed BSD Unix derivatives have set the standard for the introduction of plurality to the conventionally-singular Unix computing model. Today's system operators and developers have an array of BSD-licensed multiplicity strategies at their disposal that offer various degrees of both isolation and virtualization when introducing plurality. This paper will survey current and experimental BSD multiplicity strategies including chroot, FreeBSD jail, NetBSD/Xen, Amazon EC2, compatlinux, GXemul and SIMH, plus experimental strategies such as FreeBSD BHyVe, compatmach, Usermode NetBSD, Dragonfly BSD vkernel, OpenBSD sysjail and NetBSD mult. As an applied survey, this paper will both categorize each multiplicity strategy by the Unix environment to which it introduces plurality and demonstrate the usage of the utilities relating to each solution.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 30 May 2012
Tags: 2012, bsdcan, bsdcan2012, papers, michael dexter
html
BSDCan-2012 - Kirk McKusick - An Overview of Locking in the FreeBSD Kernel
The FreeBSD kernel uses seven different types of locks to ensure proper access to the resources that it manages. This talk describes the hierarchy of these locks from the low-level and simple to the high-level and full-featured. The functionality of each type of lock is described along with the problem domain for which it is intended. The talk concludes by describing the witness system within the FreeBSD kernel that tracks the usage of all the locks in the system and reports any possible deadlocks that might occur because of improper acquisition ordering of locks.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 30 May 2012
Tags: 2012, bsdcan, bsdcan2012, papers, kirk mckusick
Slides (27 Kb)
BSDCan-2012 - Pawel Jakub Dawidek - auditdistd - Secure and reliable distribution of audit trail files
Security Event Audit is a facility to provide fine-grained, configurable logging of security-relevant events. Audit events are stored in trail files that can be used for postmortem analysis in case of system compromise. Once the system is compromised, an attacker has access to audit trail files and can modify or delete them. The auditdistd daemon's role is to distribute audit trail files to a remote system in a secure and reliable way.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 30 May 2012
Tags: 2012, bsdcan, bsdcan2012, papers, pawel jakub dawidek
PDF (=265.6 Kb, 50 pages)
BSDCan-2012 - Ivan Voras - Bullet Cache - Balancing speed and usability in a cache server
Bullet Cache is an in-memory cache server inspired by memcached, but with a twist: a powerful record tagging and bulk query facility, configurable multithreading models and a dump / cache prewarm option. This talk will have two parts: a technical description of Bullet Cache's implementation with focus on programming techniques and optimizations, and a description of usage scenarios with the focus on how it can help real-world applications (not limited to Web applications).
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 30 May 2012
Tags: 2012, bsdcan, bsdcan2012, papers, ivan voras
PDF (=661.3 Kb, 40 pages)
BSDCan-2012 - Benedict Reuschling - Google Code-In and FreeBSD
A summary of FreeBSD's participation in the 2011 contest.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 30 May 2012
Tags: 2012, bsdcan, bsdcan2012, papers, benedict reuschling
PDF (=87.7 Kb, 160 pages)
BSDCan-2012 Photos - Developers summit and conference
Photos taken during both the DevSummit and Conference on Saturday at BSDCan 2012 in Ottawa by Ollivier Robert.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 28 May 2012
Tags: 2012, bsdcan, bsdcan2012, photos, ollivier robert
BSDCan-2011 - Brooks Davis - Improving System Management with ZFS
The Zetabyte File System (ZFS) is a modern file system which combines traditional file system features like a POSIX file system interface with RAID and volume management functionality. Features such as snapshot management and file share management are all managed within the ZFS interface. This management interface provides a number of opportunities to simplify system management. In the Technical Computing Services Sub-division of The Aerospace Corporation we are taking advantage of these features in a number of different ways. This talk presents some of the more interesting ones.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 30 May 2011
Tags: 2011, bsdcan, bsdcan2011, papers, brooks davis
PDF (=40.4 Kb, 2 pages)
BSDCan-2011 Photos - Saturday
Photos taken during the Conference on Saturday at BSDCan 2011 in Ottawa by Diane Bruce.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 14 May 2011
Tags: 2011, bsdcan, bsdcan2011, photos, diane bruce
BSDCan-2011 Photos - Friday
Photos taken during the Conference on Friday at BSDCan 2011 in Ottawa by Diane Bruce.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 13 May 2011
Tags: 2011, bsdcan, bsdcan2011, photos, diane bruce
BSDCan-2010 Photos - Saturday
Photos taken during the Conference on Saturday at BSDCan 2010 in Ottawa by Diane Bruce.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 15 May 2010
Tags: 2010, bsdcan, bsdcan2010, photos, diane bruce
BSDCan-2010 Photos - Friday
Photos taken during the Conference on Friday at BSDCan 2010 in Ottawa by Diane Bruce.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 14 May 2010
Tags: 2010, bsdcan, bsdcan2010, photos, diane bruce
BSDCan-2010 - Kris Moore - The PBI format re-implemented for FreeBSD and PC-BSD
The PBI format (Push Button Installer) has been the default package management system for PC-BSD going on 5+ years now. However as we looked to the future it became apparent that it was greatly needing an overhaul to both improve its functionality, and expand its usage outside the scope of just PC-BSD. Among the areas needing improvement were how it dealt with identical libraries between applications, the heavy requirements from being implemented in QT/KDE, and lack of a digital verification mechanism.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 20 May 2010
Tags: 2010, bsdcan, bsdcan2010, papers, kris moore
html
A Few FreeBSD Core Team Members
Interview with a few of the FreeBSD Core Team members at BSDCan 2009: Robert Watson, Brooks Davis, Hiroki Sato, Philip Paeps, and George V. Neville-Neil. We talk about the recent 7.2 release, and what is coming for 8.
Source: bsdtalk
Added: 24 May 2009
Tags: bsdtalk, interview, bsdcan, freebsd core team, robert watson, brooks davis, hiroki sato, philip paeps, george neville-neil
Ogg version (38 minutes), MP3 version (18 Mb, 38 minutes)
BSDCan 2009 with Dan Langille
Interview with Dan Langille. We talk about BSDCan 2009. More information at http://www.bsdcan.org.
Source: bsdtalk
Added: 24 May 2009
Tags: bsdtalk, interview, bsdcan, dan langille
Ogg version (13 minutes), MP3 version (6 Mb, 13 minutes)
Robert Watson's Slides from BSDCan 2006 and FreeBSD Developer Summit
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.
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)
Robert Watson's Slides from BSDCan 2004
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.
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-2006 Photos - Friday
Photos taken during the Conference on Friday at BSDCan 2006 in Ottawa by Diane Bruce.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 24 May 2006
Tags: 2006, bsdcan, bsdcan2006, photos, diane bruce
BSDCan-2006 Photos - Saturday
Photos taken during the Conference on Saturday at BSDCan 2006 in Ottawa by Diane Bruce.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 24 May 2006
Tags: 2006, bsdcan, bsdcan2006, photos, diane bruce
Chris Buechler and Scott Ullrich - pfSense: 2.0 and beyond
pfSense: 2.0 and beyond From firewall distribution to appliance building platform pfSense is a BSD licensed 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. This session will start with an introduction to the project and its common uses, which have expanded considerably beyond firewalling. We will cover much of the new functionality coming in the 2.0 release, which contains significant enhancements to nearly every portion of the system as well as numerous new features. While the primary function of the project is a firewalling and routing platform, with changes coming in pfSense 2.0, it has also become an appliance building framework enabling the creation of customized special purpose appliances. The m0n0wall code where pfSense originated has proved popular for this purpose, with AskoziaPBX and FreeNAS also based upon it, in addition to a number of commercial solutions. The goal of this appliance building framework is to enable creation of projects such as these without having to fork and maintain another code base. The existing appliances, including a DNS server using TinyDNS, VoIP with FreeSWITCH, and others will be discussed. For those interested in creating appliances, an overview of the process will be provided along with references for additional information.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, pfsense, chris buechler, scott ullrich
Slides (3.2 Mb, 36 pages)
Luigi Rizzo - GEOM based disk schedulers for FreeBSD
GEOM based disk schedulers for FreeBSD The high cost of seek operations makes the throughput of disk devices very sensitive to the offered workload. A disk scheduler can then help reorder requests to improve the overall throughput of the device, or improve the service guarantees for individual users, or both. Research results in recent years have introduced, and proven the effectiveness of, a technique called "anticipatory scheduling". The basic idea behind this technique is that, in some cases, requests that cause a seek should not be served immediately; instead, the scheduler should wait for a short period of time in case other requests arrive that do not require a seek to be served. With many common workloads, dominated by sequential synchronous requests, the potential loss of throughput caused by the disk idling times is more than balanced by the overall reduction of seeks. While a fair amount of research on disk scheduling has been conducted on FreeBSD, the results were never integrated in the OS, perhaps because the various prototype implementations were very device-specific and operated within the device drivers. Ironically, anticipatory schedulers are instead a standard part of Linux kernels. This talk has two major contributions: First, we will show how, thanks to the flexibility of the GEOM architecture, an anticipatory disk scheduling framework has been implemented in FreeBSD with little or no modification to a GENERIC kernel. While these schedulers operate slightly above the layer where one would naturally put a scheduler, they can still achieve substantial performance improvements over the standard disk scheduler; in particular, even the simplest anticipatory schedulers can prevent the complete trashing of the disk performance that often occurs in presence of multiple processes accessing the disk. Secondly, we will discuss how the basic anticipatory scheduling technique can be used not only to improve the overall throughput of the disk, but also to give service guarantees to individual disk clients, a feature that is extremely important in practice e.g., when serving applications with pseudo-real-time constraints such as audio or video streaming ones. A prototype implementation of the scheduler that will be covered in the presentation is available at http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/FreeBSD/
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, freebsd, geom, disk schedulers, luigi rzzo
Slides (430 Kb, 40 pages)
Constantine A. Murenin - Quiet Computing with BSD
Quiet Computing with BSD Programming system hardware monitors for quiet computing In this talk, we will present a detailed overview of the features and common problems of microprocessor system hardware monitors as they relate to the topic of silent computing. In a nutshell, the topic of programmable fan control will be explored. Silent computing is an important subject as its practice reduces the amount of unnecessary stress and improves the motivation of the workforce, at home and in the office. Attendees will gain knowledge on how to effectively programme the chips to minimise fan noise and avoid system failure or shutdown during temperature fluctuations, as well as some basic principles regarding quiet computing. Shortly before the talk, a patch for programming the most popular chips (like those from Winbond) will be released for the OpenBSD operating system, although the talk itself will be more specific to the microprocessor system hardware monitors themselves, as opposed to the interfacing with thereof in modern operating systems like OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, openbsd, hardware sensors, constantine murenin
Slides (264 Kb, 16 pages)
Fernando Gont - Results of a Security Assessment of the TCP and IP protocols and Common implementation Strategies
Results of a Security Assessment of the TCP and IP protocols and Common implementation Strategies Fernando Gont will present the results of security assessment of the TCP and IP protocols carried out on behalf of the United Kingdom's Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure). His presentation will provide an overview of the aforementioned project, and will describe some of the new insights that were gained as a result of this project. Additionally, it will provide an overview of the state of affairs of the different TCP/IP implementations found in BSD operating systems with respect to the aforementioned issues. During the last twenty years, many vulnerabilities have been identified in the TCP/IP stacks of a number of systems. The discovery of these vulnerabilities led in most cases to reports being published by a number of CSIRTs and vendors, which helped to raise awareness about the threats and the best possible mitigations known at the time the reports were published. For some reason, much of the effort of the security community on the Internet protocols did not result in official documents (RFCs) being issued by the organization in charge of the standardization of the communication protocols in use by the Internet: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This basically led to a situation in which "known" security problems have not always been addressed by all vendors. In addition, in many cases vendors have implemented quick "fixes" to the identified vulnerabilities without a careful analysis of their effectiveness and their impact on interoperability. As a result, producing a secure TCP/IP implementation nowadays is a very difficult task, in large part because of the hard task of identifying relevant documentation and differentiating between that which provides correct advisory, and that which provides misleading advisory based on inaccurate or wrong assumptions. During 2006, the United Kingdom's Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure embarked itself in an ambitious and arduous project: performing a security assessment of the TCP and IP protocols. The project did not limit itself to an analysis of the relevant IETF specifications, but also included an analysis of common implementation strategies found in the most popular TCP and IP implementations. The result of the project was a set of documents which identifies possible threats for the TCP and IP protocols and, where possible, proposes counter-measures to mitigate the identified threats. This presentation will will describe some of the new insights that were gained as a result of this project. Additionally, it will provide an overview of the state of affairs of the different TCP/IP implementations found in BSD operating systems.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, bsd, security assessment, fernado gont
Security Assessment of the Internet Protocol (660 Kb, 63 pages), Slides (473 Kb, 64 pages), Proposal (93 Kb, 3 pages), Security Assessment of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) (1.4 Mb, 130 pages)
Randi Harper - Automating FreeBSD Installations
Automating FreeBSD Installations PXE Booting and install.cfg Demystified This paper will provide an explanation of the tools involved in performing an automated FreeBSD install and a live demonstration of the process. FreeBSD's sysinstall provides a powerful and flexible mechanism for automated installs but doesn't get used very often because of a lack of documentation.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, freebsd, pxe, sysinstall, randi harper
Slides (33 Kb, 14 pages)
Brooks Davis - Isolating Cluster Jobs for Performance and Predictability
Isolating Cluster Jobs for Performance and Predictability At The Aerospace Corporation, we run a large FreeBSD based computing cluster to support engineering applications. These applications come in all shapes, sizes, and qualities of implementation. To support them and our diverse userbase we have been searching for ways to isolate jobs from one another in ways that are more effective than Unix time sharing and more fine grained than allocating whole nodes to jobs. In this talk we discuss the problem space and our efforts so far. These efforts include implementation of partial file systems virtualization and CPU isolation using CPU sets.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, freebsd, cluster, brooks davis
Slides (1.4 Mb, 27 pages)
John Baldwin - Multiple Passes of the FreeBSD Device Tree
Multiple Passes of the FreeBSD Device Tree The existing device driver framework in FreeBSD works fairly well for many tasks. However, there are a few problems that are not easily solved with the current design. These problems include having "real" device drivers for low-level hardware such as clocks and interrupt controllers, proper resource discovery and management, and allowing most drivers to always probe and attach in an environment where interrupts are enabled. I propose extending the device driver framework to support multiple passes over the device tree during boot. This would allow certain classes of drivers to be attached earlier and perform boot-time setup before other drivers are probed and attached. This in turn can be used to develop solutions to the earlier list of problems.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, freebsd, device tree, john baldwin
Slides (60 Kb, 15 pages), Paper (103 Kb, 8 pages)
Colin Percival - scrypt: A new key derivation function
scrypt: A new key derivation function Doing our best to thwart TLAs armed with ASICs Password-based key derivation functions are used for two primary purposes: First, to hash passwords so that an attacker who gains access to a password file does not immediately possess the passwords contained therewithin; and second, to generate cryptographic keys to be used for encrypting or authenticating data. In both cases, if passwords do not have sufficient entropy, an attacker with the relevant data can perform a brute force attack, hashing potential passwords repeatedly until the correct key is found. While commonly used key derivation functions, such as Kamp's iterated MD5, Provos and Mazieres' bcrypt, and RSA Laboratories' PBKDF1 and PBKDF2 make an attempt to increase the difficulty of brute-force attacks, they all require very little memory, making them ideally suited to attack by custom hardware. In this talk, I will introduce the concepts of memory-hard and sequential memory-hard functions, and argue that key derivation functions should be sequential memory-hard. I will present a key derivation function which, subject to common assumptions about cryptographic hash functions, is provably sequential memory-hard, and a variation which appears to be stronger (but not provably so). Finally, I will provide some estimates of the cost of performing brute force attacks on a variety of password strengths and key derivation functions.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, scrypt, colin percival
Slides (556 Kb, 21 pages), Paper (201 Kb, 16 pages)
George Neville-Neil - Thinking about thinking in code
Thinking about thinking in code Proposed keynote talk This is not a talk that's specific to any BSD but is a more general talk about how we think about coding and how our thinking changes the way we code. I compare how we built systems to how other industries build their products and talk about what we can learn from how we work and from how others work as well.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, keynote, bsd, george neville-neil
Slides (4.0 Mb, 137 pages)
Stephen Borrill - Building products with NetBSD - thin-clients
Building products with NetBSD - thin-clients NetBSD: delivering the goods This talk will discuss what thin-clients are, why they are useful and why NetBSD is good choice to build such a device. This talk will provide information on some alternatives and the strengths and weaknesses of NetBSD when used in such a device. It will discuss problems that needed to be addressed such as how to get a device with rich functionality running from a small amount of flash storage, as well as recent developments in NetBSD that have helped improve the product.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, netbsd, thin client, stephen borrill
Slides (499 Kb, 60 pages)
Cat Allman and Leslie Hawthorn - Getting Started in Free and Open Source
Getting Started in Free and Open Source Interested in getting involved? But don't really know where or how to start? The talk is called "Getting Started in Free and Open Source". It's a talk for beginners who are interested to getting involved but don't really know where or how to start. We cover the basics of: -why you might want to get involved -what you can get out of participating -more than coding is needed -how to chose a project -how to get started -etiquette of lists and other communication -dos and don't of joining a community
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, getting started, cat allman, leslie hawthorn
Slides (893 Kb, 25 pages)
Warner Losh - Tracking FreeBSD in a commercial Environment
Tracking FreeBSD in a commercial Environment How to stay current while staying sane The FreeBSD project publishes two lines of source code: current and stable. All changes must first be committed to current and then are merged into stable. Commercial organizations wishing to use FreeBSD in their products must be aware of this policy. Four different strategies have developed for tracking FreeBSD over time. A company can choose to run only unmodified release versions of FreeBSD. A company may choose to import FreeBSD's sources once and then never merge newer versions. A company can choose to import each new stable branch as it is created, adding its own changes to that branch, as well as integrating new versions from FreeBSD from time to time. A company can track FreeBSD's current branch, adding to it their changes as well as newer FreeBSD changes. Which method a company chooses depends on the needs of the company. These methods are explored in detail, and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Tracking FreeBSD's ports and packages is not discussed. Companies building products based upon FreeBSD have many choices in how to use the projects sources and binaries. The choices range from using unmodified binaries from FreeBSD's releases, to tracking modify FreeBSD heavily and tracking FreeBSD's evolution in a merged tree. Some companies may only need to maintain a stable version of FreeBSD with more bug fixes or customizations than the FreeBSD project wishes to place in that branch. Some companies also wish to contribute some subset of their changes back to the FreeBSD project. FreeBSD provides an excellent base technology with which to base products. It is a proven leader in performance, reliability and scalability. The technology also offers a very business friendly license that allows companies to pick and choose which changes they wish to contribute to the community rather than forcing all changes to be contributed back, or attaching other undesirable license conditions to the code. However, the FreeBSD project does not focus on integration of its technology into customized commercial products. Instead, the project focuses on producing a good, reliable, fast and scalable operating system and associated packages. The project maintains two lines of development. A current branch, where the main development of the project takes place, and a stable branch which is managed for stability and reliability. While the project maintains documentation on the system, including its development model, relatively little guidance has been given to companies in how to integrate FreeBSD into their products with a minimum of trouble. Developing a sensible strategy to deal with both these portions of FreeBSD requires careful planning and analysis. FreeBSD's lack of guidelines to companies leaves it up to them to develop a strategy. FreeBSD's development model differs from some of the other Free and Open Source projects. People familiar with those systems often discover that methods that were well suited to them may not work as well with FreeBSD's development model. These two issues cause many companies to make poor decisions without understanding the problems that lie in their future. Very little formal guidance exists for companies wishing to integrate FreeBSD into their products. Some email threads can be located via a Google search that could help companies, but many of them are full of contradictory information, and it is very disorganized. While the information about the FreeBSD development process is in the FreeBSD handbook, the implications of that process for companies integrating FreeBSD into their products are not discussed.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, freebsd, commercial environment, waner losh
Paper (624 Kb, 45 pages), Slides (104 Kb, 10 pages)
Kris Moore - PC-BSD - Making FreeBSD on the desktop a reality
PC-BSD - Making FreeBSD on the desktop a reality FreeBSD on the Desktop While FreeBSD is a all-around great operating system, it is greatly lagging behind in desktop appeal. Why is this? In this talk, we will take a look at some of the desktop drawbacks of FreeBSD, and how are are attempting to fix them through PC-BSD. FreeBSD has a reputation for its rock-solid reliability, and top-notch performance in the server world, but is noticeably absent when it comes to the vast market of desktop computing. Why is this? FreeBSD offers many, if not almost all of the same open-source packages and software that can be found in the more popular Linux desktop distributions, yet even with the speed and reliability FreeBSD offers, a relative few number of users are deploying it on their desktops. In this presentation we will take a look at some of the reasons why FreeBSD has not been as widely adopted in the desktop market as it has on the server side. Several of the desktop weaknesses of FreeBSD will be shown, along with how we are trying to fix these short-comings through a desktop-centric version of FreeBSD, known as PC-BSD. We will also take a look at the package management system employed by all open-source operating systems alike, and some of the pitfalls it brings, which may hinder widespread desktop adoption.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, pc-bsd, freebsd, kris moore
Paper (351 Kb, 9 pages), Slides (512 Kb, 35 pages)
Sean Bruno - Implementation of TARGET_MODE applications
Implementation of TARGET_MODE applications How we used TARGET_MODE in the kernel to create and interesting product This presentation will cover a real world implementation of the TARGET_MODE infrastructure in the kernel (stable/6). Topics to include: drivers used (isp, aic7xxx, firewire). scsi_target userland code vs kernel drivers missing drivers (4/8G isp support, iSCSI target) Target Mode describes a feature within certain drivers that allows a FreeBSD system to emulate a Target in the SCSI sense of the word. By recompiling your kernel with this feature enabled, it permits one to turn a FreeBSD system into an external hard disk. This feature of the FreeBSD kernel provides many interesting implementations and is highly desirable to many organizations whom run FreeBSD as their platform. I have been tasked with the maintenance of a proprietary target driver that interfaces with the FreeBSD kernel to do offsite data mirroring at the block level. This talk will discuss the implementation of that kernel mode driver and the process my employer went through to implement a robust and flexible appliance. Since I took over the implementation, we have implemented U160 SCSI(via aic7xxx), 2G Fibre Channel(via isp) and Firewire 400 (via sbp_targ). Each driver has it's own subtleties and requirements. I personally enhanced the existing Firewire target driver and was able to get some interesting results. I hope to demonstrate a functional Firewire 400/800 target and show how useful this application can be for the embedded space. Also, I wish to demonstrate the need for iSCSI. USB and 4/8G Fibre Channel target implementations that use the TARGET_MODE infrastructure that is currently in place to allow others to expand their various interface types. The presentation should consist of a high level overview, followed by detailed implementation instructions with regards to the Firewire implementation and finish up with a hands-on demonstration with a FreeBSD PC flipped into TARGET_MODE and a Mac.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, freebsd, firewire, sean bruno
Slides (72 Kb, 22 pages)
George Neville-Neil - Understanding and Tuning SCHED_ULE
Understanding and Tuning SCHED_ULE With the advent of widespread SMP and multicore CPU architectures it was necessary to implement a new scheduler in the FreeBSD operating system. The SCHEDULE scheduler was added for the 5 series of FreeBSD releases and has now matured to the point where it is the default scheduler in the 7.1 release. While scheduling processes was a difficult enough task in the uniprocessor world, moving to multiple processors, and multiple cores, has significantly increased the number of problems that await engineers who wish to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of their system. This talk will cover the basic design of SCHEDULE and focus a great deal of attention on how to tune the scheduler for different workloads, using the sysctl interfaces that have been provided for that purpose. Understanding and tuning a scheduler used to be done only by operating systems designers and perhaps a small minority of engineers focusing on esoteric high performance systems. With the advent of widespread multi-processor and multi-core architectures it has become necessary for more users and administrators to decide how to tune their systems for the best performance. The SCHEDULE scheduler in FreeBSD provides a set of sysctl interfaces for tuning the scheduler at run time, but in order to use these interfaces effectively the scheduling process must first be understood. This presentation will give an overview of how SCHEDULE works and then will show several examples of tuning the system with the interfaces provided. The goal of modifying the scheduler's parameters is to change the overall performance of programs on the system. One of the first problems presented to the person who wants to tune the scheduler is how to measure the effects of their changes. Simply tweaking the parameters and hoping that that will help is not going to lead to good results. In our recent experiments we have used the top(1) program to measure our results.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, freebsd, sched_ule, george neville-neil
Slides (228 Kb, 29 pages)
Lawrence Stewart - Improving the FreeBSD TCP Implementation
Improving the FreeBSD TCP Implementation. An update on all things TCP in FreeBSD and how they affect you. My involvement in improving the FreeBSD TCP stack has continued this past year, with much of the work targeted at FreeBSD 8. This talk will cover what these changes entail, why they are of interest to the FreeBSD community and how they help to improve our TCP implementation. It has been a busy year since attending my inaugural BSDCan in 2008, where I talked about some of my work with TCP in FreeBSD. I have continued the work on TCP analysis/debugging tools and integrating modular congestion control into FreeBSD as part of the NewTCP research project. I will provide a progress update on this work. Additionally, a grant win from the FreeBSD Foundation to undertake a project titled "Improving the FreeBSD TCP Implementation" at Swinburne University's Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures has been progressing well. The project focuses on bringing TCP Appropriate Byte Counting (RFC 3465), reassembly queue auto-tuning and integration of low-level analysis/debugging tools to the base system, all of which I will also discuss.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, freebsd, tcp, lawrence stewart
Slides (2.1 Mb, 38 pages)
Joerg Sonnenberger - Journaling FFS with WAPBL
Journaling FFS with WAPBL NetBSD 5 is the first NetBSD release with a journaling filesystem. This lecture introduces the structure of the Fast File System, the modifications for WAPBL and specific constraints of the implementation. The Fast File System (FFS) has been used in the BSD land for more than two decades. The original implementation offered two operational modes: safe and slow (sync) unsafe and fast (async) One decade ago, Kirk McKusick introduced the soft dependency mechanism to offset the performance impact without risk of mortal peril on the first crash. With the advent of Terabyte hard disks, the need for a file system check (fsck) after a crash becomes finally unacceptable. Even a background fsck like supported on FreeBSD consumes lots of CPU time and IO bandwidth. Based on a donation from Wasabi Systems, Write Ahead Physical Block Logging (WAPBL) provides journaling for FFS with similar or better performance than soft dependencies during normal operation. Recovery time after crashes depends on the amount of outstanding IO operations and normally takes a few seconds. This lecture gives a short overview of FFS and the consistency constraints for meta data updates. It introduces the WAPBL changes, both in terms of the on-disk format and the implementation in NetBSD. Finally the implementation is compared to the design of comparable file systems and specific issues of and plans for the current implementation are discussed.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, netbsd, wapbl, ffs, joerg sonnenberger
Slides (10 Kb, 24 pages)
Ivan Voras - Remote and mass management of systems with finstall
Remote and mass management of systems with finstall Automated management on a largish scale An important part of the "finstall" project, created as a graphical installer for FreeBSD, is a configuration server that can be used to remotely administer and configure arbitrary systems. It allows for remote scripting of administration tasks and is flexible enough to support complete reconfiguration of running systems. The finstall project has two major parts - the front-end and the back-end. The front-end is just a GUI allowing the users to install the system in a convenient way. The back-end is a network-enabled XML-RPC server that is used by the front-end to perform its tasks. It can be used as a stand-alone configuration daemon. This talk will describe a way to make use of this property of finstall to remotely manage large groups of systems.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, finstall, management, freebsd, ivan voras
Slides (377 Kb, 24 pages)
Mike Silbersack - Detecting TCP regressions with tcpdiff
Detecting TCP regressions with tcpdiff Determining if a TCP stack is working correctly is hard. The tcpdiff project aims for a simpler goal: To automatically detect differences in TCP behavior between different versions of an operating system and display those differences in an easy to understand format. The value judgement of whether a certain change between version X and Y of a TCP stack is good or bad will be left to human eyes. Determining if a TCP stack is working correctly is hard. The tcpdiff project aims for a simpler goal: To automatically detect differences in TCP behavior between different versions of an operating system and display those differences in an easy to understand format. The value judgement of whether a certain change between version X and Y of a TCP stack is good or bad will be left to human eyes. The initial version of tcpdiff presented at NYCBSDCon 2008 demonstrated that it could be used to detect at least two major TCP bugs that were introduced into FreeBSD in the past few years. The work from that presentation can be viewed at http://www.silby.com/nycbsdcon08/. For BSDCan 2009, I hope to fix a number of bugs in tcpdiff, make it easier to use, set up nightly tests of FreeBSD, and improve it so that additional known bugs can be detected. Additionally, I plan to run it on OSes other than FreeBSD.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, tcpdiff, freebsd, mike silbersack
Slides (89 Kb, 33 pages)
Philip Paeps - Crypto Acceleration on FreeBSD
Crypto Acceleration on FreeBSD As more and more services on the internet become cryptographically secured, the load of cryptography on systems becomes heavier and heavier. Crypto acceleration hardware is available in different forms for different workloads. Embedded communications processors from VIA and AMD have limited acceleration facilities in silicon and various manufacturers build hardware for accelerating secure web traffic and IPSEC VPN tunnels. This talk gives an overview of FreeBSD's crypto framework in the kernel and how it can be used together with OpenSSL to leverage acceleration hardware. Some numbers will be presented to demonstrate how acceleration can improve performance - and how it can curiously bring a system to a grinding halt. Philip originally started playing with crypto acceleration when he saw the "crypto block" in one of his Soekris boards. As usual, addiction was instant and by the grace of the "you touch it, you own it" principle, he has been fiddling the crypto framework more than is good for him.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, crypto acceleration, freebsd, philip paeps
Slides (361 Kb, 28 pages)
Sean Bruno - Firewire BoF Plugfest
Firewire BoF Plugfest Debugging and testing of Firewire products with FreeBSD Come one come all to a Firewire plugfest. Let's debug and test together and see if we can't knock out some features and bugs. A hands-on testing and debugging session of the Firewire stack in FreeBSD. Everyone who wishes to attend should bring their Firewire devices, ext Drives and Cameras, and their Laptops. I will be debugging and capturing data points to enhance and improve features in the Firewire stack. We should be able to knock out quite a bunch of bugs if folks can bring their various Firewire devices along with their various PCs. Even if your Firewire device works perfectly, bring it by so it can be documented as supported by the Firewire team!
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, presentation, firewire, plugfest, sean bruno
Slides (37 Kb, 1 page)
Peter Hansteen - Building the Network You Need with PF, the OpenBSD packet filter
Building the Network You Need with PF, the OpenBSD packet filter. Building the network you need is the central theme for any network admin. This tutorial is for aspiring or seasoned network professionals with at least a basic knowledge of networking in general and TCP/IP particular. The session aims at teaching tools and techniques to make sure you build your network to work the way it's supposed to, keeping you in charge. Central to the toolbox is the OpenBSD PF packet filter, supplemented with tools that interact with it. Whether you are a greybeard looking for ways to optimize your setups or a greenhorn just starting out, this session will give you valuable insight into the inner life of your network and provide pointers to how to use that knowledge to build the network you need. The session will also offer some fresh information on changes introduced in OpenBSD 4.5, the most recent version of PF and OpenBSD. The tutorial is loosely based on Hansteen's recent book, /The Book of PF/ (No Starch Press), with updates and adaptations based on developments since the book's publication date.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, tutorial, pf, openbsd, peter hansteen
Slides (2.5 Mb, 68 pages)
George Neville-Neil - Networking from the Bottom Up: Device Drivers
Networking from the Bottom Up: Device Drivers. In this tutorial I will describe how to write and maintain network drivers in FreeBSD and use the example of the Intel Gigabit Ethernet driver (igb) throughout the course. Students will learn the basic data structures and APIs necessary to implement a network driver in FreeBSD. The tutorial is general enough that it can be applied to other BSDs, and likely to other embedded and UNIX like systems while being specific enough that given a device and a manual the student should be able to develop a working driver on their own. This is the first of a series of lectures on network that I am developing over the next year or so.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 25 May 2009
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2009, tutorial, device drivers, george neville-neil
PDF file (480 Kb, 68 pages)
Daniel Braniss
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.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 28 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, presentation, iscsi, daniel braniss
PDF file (1.4 Mb, 30 pages)
Scott Ullrich, Chris Buechler - pfSense Tutorial
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.
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)
Bjoern A. Zeeb - BSDCan08 devsummit summary
200805DevSummit - BSDCan 2008 FreeBSD Developer summit summary
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 28 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, devsummit, devsummit2008, freebsd, writeup, bjoern a zeeb
Rafal Jaworowski - FreeBSD Embedded Report
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)
Robert Watson - TCP SMP Scalability
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)
Erwin Lansing - What's happening in the world of ports and portmgr
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)
Kern Sibbald - Bacula
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.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 26 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, bacula, kern sibbald
PDF file (505 Kb, 30 pages)
Warner Losh - FreeBSD/mips
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.
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)
Kris Moore - Building self-contained PBIs from Ports (Automagically)
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
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)
John Pertalion - An Open Source Enterprise VPN Solution with OpenVPN and OpenBSD
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.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 26 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, openbsd, openvpn, john pertalion
PDF file (127 Kb, 26 pages)
Ivan Voras - "finstall" - the new FreeBSD installer
"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.
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)
Poul-Henning Kamp - Measured (almost) does Air Traffic Control
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.
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)
Chris Lattner - BSD licensed C++ compiler
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).
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)
Robert Watson - BSDCan 2008 - Closing
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.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 21 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, robert watson
PDF file (428 Kb, 55 pages)
Leslie Hawthorn - Google SoC
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.
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)
Pawel Jakub Dawidek - A closer look at the ZFS file system
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.
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)
Rafal Jaworowski - Interfacing embedded FreeBSD with U-Boot
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.
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)
John Baldwin - Introduction to Debugging the FreeBSD Kernel
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
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)
John Birrell - DTrace for FreeBSD
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 formulate using the DTrace D programming language. This talk discusses the port of the DTrace facility to FreeBSD and demonstrates examples on a live FreeBSD system. Introduction to the D language - probes, predicates and actions. dtrace(8) and libdtrace - the userland side of the DTrace story. The DTrace kernel module, it's ioctl interface to userland and the provider infrastructure in the kernel. DTrace kernel hooks and the problem of code licensed under Sun's CDDL. What does a DTrace probe actually do? DTrace safety and how it is implemented. Build system changes to add CTF (Compact C Type Format) data to objects, shared libraries and executables. The DTrace test suite. A brief list of things to do to port the DTrace facility to other BSD-derived operating systems.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 21 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, dtrace, freebsd, john birrell
PDF file (148 Kb, 49 pages)
Matthieu Herrb - X.org
X.org upcoming plans The X.Org project provides an open source implementation of the X Window System. The development work is being done in conjunction with the freedesktop.org community. The X.Org Foundation is the educational non-profit corporation whose Board serves this effort, and whose Members lead this work. The X window system has been changing a lot in the recent years, and still changing. This talk will present this evolution, summarizing what has already been done and showing the current roadmap for future evolutions, with some focus on how *BSD kernels can be affected by the developments done with Linux as the primary target.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 21 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, x.org, matthieu herrb
PDF file (1.6 Mb, 30 pages)
Adrian Chad - What Not To Do When Writing Network Applications
What Not To Do When Writing Network Applications The lessons learnt working with not-so-high-performance network applications This talk will look at issues which face the modern network application developer, from the point of view of poorly-designed examples. This will cover internal code structure and dataflow, interaction with the TCP stack, IO scheduling in high and low latency environments and high-availability considerations. In essence, this presentation should be seen as a checklist of what not to do when writing network applications. Plenty of examples of well designed network applications exist in the open and closed source world today. Unfortunately there are just as many examples of fast network applications as there are "fast but workload specific"; sometimes failing miserably in handling the general case. This may be due to explicit design (eg Varnish) but many are simply due to the designer not fully appreciating the wide variance in "networks" - and their network application degrades ungracefully when under duress. My aim in this presentation is to touch on a wide number of issues which face network application programmers - most of which seem not "application related" to the newcomer - such as including pipelining into network communication, managing a balance between accepting new requests and servicing existing requests, or providing back-pressure to a L4 loadbalancer in case of traffic bursts. Various schemes for working with these issues will be presented, and hopefully participants will walk away with more of an understanding about how the network, application and operating systems interact.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 21 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, network applications, adrian chad
PDF file (190 Kb, 73 pages)
Brooks Davis - Using FreeBSD to Promote Open Source Development Methods
Using FreeBSD to Promote Open Source Development Methods In this talk we present Aerosource, an initiative to bring Open Source Software development methods to internal software developers at The Aerospace Corporation. Within Aerosource, FreeBSD is used in several key roles. First, we run most of our tools on top of FreeBSD. Second, the ports collection (both official ports and custom internal ones) eases our administrative burden. Third, the FreeBSD project serves as an example and role model for the results that can be achieved by an Open Source Software projects. We discuss the development infrastructure we have built for Aerosource based largely on BSD licensed software including FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, Apache, and Trac. We will also discuss our custom management tools including our system for managing our custom internal ports. Finally, we will cover our development successes and how we use projects like FreeBSD as exemplars of OSS development.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 21 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, abstract, software development, brooks davis
PDF file (1 Mb, 33 pages), PDF file (72 Kb, 2 pages)
Randall Stewart - SCTP what it is and how to use it
SCTP - SCTP what it is and how to use it This talk will introduce the attendee into the interesting world of SCTP. We will first discuss the new and different features that SCTP (a new transport in FreeBSD 7.0) provide to the user. Then we will shift gears and discuss the extended socket API that is available to SCTP users and will cover such items as: The two socket programming models Extended system calls that support the SCTP feature set. What model may fit you best
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 21 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, abstract, freebsd, sctp, randall stewart
PDF file (130 Kb, 10 pages)
Rafal Jaworowski - Porting FreeBSD/ARM to Marvell Orion System-On-Chip
Porting FreeBSD/ARM to Marvell Orion System-On-Chip This talk covers the development work on porting the FreeBSD/ARM to Marvell Orion family of highly integrated chips. ARM architecture is widely adopted in the embedded devices, and since the architecture can be licensed, many implementation variations exist: Orion is a derivative compliant with the ARMv5TE definition, it provides a rich set of on-chip peripherals. Present state of the FreeBSD support for ARM is explained, areas for improvement highlighted and its overall shape and condition presented. The main discussion covers scope of the Orion port (what integrated peripherals required new development, what was adapted from existing code base); design decisions are explained for the most critical items, and implementation details revealed. Summary notes are given on general porting methodology, debugging techniques and difficulties encountered during such undertaking.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 21 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, freebsd, arm, marvell orion, rafal jaworowski
PDF file (193 Kb, 25 pages)
Dan Langille - BSDCan 2008 - Opening session
Opening session Welcome to BSDCan 2008 Traditional greetings
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 21 May 2008
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2008, slides, dan langille
PDF file (500 Kb, 17 pages)
BSDCan-2007 - Videos
The 2007 BSDCan conference Kirk McKusick - Code Reading of Locally-Connected Sockets
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 24 August 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, talks, kirk mckusick
MOV file (77 Mb, 35 minutes)
BSDCan-2007 - Videos
The 2007 BSDCan conference Erwin Lansing - The state of the FreeBSD Ports Tree
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 14 August 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, talks, erwin lansing, ports
MOV file (39 Mb, 20 minutes)
BSDCan-2007 Videos
The 2007 BSDCan conference - Introduction of people.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 13 August 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, talks
MOV file (16 Mb, 9 minutes)
BSDCan-2007 - Videos
The 2007 BSDCan conference Kris Kennaway - Scalability Update 2007 Progress on FreeBSD SMP performance and scalablity since BSDCan Dev Summit 2006
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 13 August 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, talks, kris kennaway, scalability
MOV file (148 Mb, 73 minutes)
BSDCan-2007 - Videos
The 2007 BSDCan conference Qing Li - Routing, ARP and ND6
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 13 August 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, talks, qing li, routing arp and nd6
MOV file (63 Mb, 30 minutes)
BSDCan-2007 - Videos
The 2007 BSDCan conference Marko Zec explains the vimage architecture
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 13 August 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, talks, marko zec, vimage
MOV file (44 Mb, 20 minutes)
BSDCan-2007 - Videos
The 2007 BSDCan conference Max Laier - PFIL, firewalls and locking
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 13 August 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, talks, max laier, ipf
MOV file (52 Mb, 30 minutes)
BSDCan-2007 Photos
Photos taken during both DevSummit and Conference at BSDCan 2007 in Ottawa by Ollivier Robert.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 18 May 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, photos, ollivier robert
BSDCan-2007 Photos - Friday
Photos taken during both DevSummit and Conference on Friday at BSDCan 2007 in Ottawa by Diane Bruce.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 19 May 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, photos, diane bruce
BSDCan-2007 Photos - Saturday
Photos taken during both DevSummit and Conference on Saturday at BSDCan 2007 in Ottawa by Diane Bruce.
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 20 May 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, photos, diane bruce
BSDCan-2007 Photos - Scott Murphy
Photos taken at BSDCan 2007 by Scott Murphy
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 24 May 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, photos, scott murphy
BSDCan-2007 Photos - Bjoern A. Zeeb
Photos taken at BSDCan 2007 by Bjoern A. Zeeb
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 24 May 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, photos, bjoern a zeeb
BSDCan-2007 Photos - Randi Harper
Photos taken at BSDCan 2007 by Randi Harper
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 24 May 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, photos, randi harper, freebsdgirl
BSDCan-2007 Photos - Dru Lavigne
Photos taken at BSDCan 2007 by Dru Lavigne
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 24 May 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, photos, dru lavigne
The FreeBSD Security Officer function
"FreeBSD Security Officer function" at BSDCAN 2007 by Simon L. Nielsen (FreeBSD Deputy Security Officer)
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 20 May 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, pdf, freebsd, security officer, simon l nielsen
PDF version (252 Kb, 29 pages)
FreeBSD Portsnap
"FreeBSD Portsnap - What (it is), Why (it was written), and How (it works)" by Colin Percival (cperciva@FreeBSD.org) (Note: use ^L to get back in non-fullscreen mode)
Source: BSDCan - The Technical BSD Conference
Added: 20 May 2007
Tags: bsdcan, bsdcan2007, pdf, portsnap, freebsd, colin percival
PDF version (1.3 Mb, 88 pages)