This weekend I had the pleasure of attending the third edition of the BSD community day at the NLLGG meeting in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I was happy to see that there were at least as many, if not more, attendees at the BSD track as the general track.

The BSD track featured 4 interesting talks. Rene Laden opened the day with a talk on porting ROS (Robot Operating System) to FreeBSD, detailing some of the difficulties of getting the core bits working, which already are in ports and some ideas and plans for future work. Ed Schouten was next with an update on integrating the clang compiler into FreeBSD. A lot of work has already been done here, but still more to come. The third talk by Paul Schenkeveld had some very interesting ideas of how to combine nanoBSD‘s image building features with ZFS snapshots as generalized way to upgrade software on servers, while minimizing downtown and providing an easy rollback when the upgrade doesn’t go as expected. The day ended with Otto Moerbeek’s overview of some of the security features in OpenBSD, with special focus on privilege separation in and between processes.

A big thanks to NLLGG for hosting the event, I certainly both enjoyed the day and learned some new things. We’ll see each other again next year at EuroBSDCon.