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: bsdcan2009
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)