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.

While the snow falls outside and the holidays approaching fast, it is time for the FreeBSD Foundations yearly End-of-Year fundraising campaign. This year again brought an impressive list of accomplishments by the Foundation, to mention a few:

• Provided $100,000 in grants for projects that improve FreeBSD in the areas of:
  – DTrace support
  – High availability storage
  – Enhanced SNMP reporting
  – Virtualization and resource partitioning
  – Embedded device support
  – Networking stack improvements
• Allocated $50,000 for equipment to enhance FreeBSD project infrastructure.
• Sponsored 8 FreeBSD related conferences.
• Funded 16 travel grants giving increased community and developer access to conferences.
• Provided legal support to the FreeBSD project.

We are fortunate to already have reached half of this years fund-raising goal of $350,000, so please consider a donation, no matter how large or small, to help us reach that goal and help us continue supporting the FreeBSD community through next year as well.

Read the full letter by Justin Gibbs, President of the FreeBSD Foundation.

Last night, I committed a large update to the ports tree that deprecated MD5 checksums based on the work by Doug Barton and Rene Laden in ports/149657. For a long time we’ve had both MD5 and SHA256 checksums in the distinfo file, even though having multiple checksumming algorithms does not add any additional security. From today, MD5 checksums are no longer generated, but existing checksums will silently be ignored. For now, we won’t be doing large sweeps through the tree removing MD5, but let them slowly disappear when individual ports are updated, to avoid the churn on the cvs repository, mirrors, and package build infrastructure such large sweeps will cause.
The ports framework internals were also updated to reflect this change by renaming the MD5_FILE macro to DISTINFO_FILE. A lot of thanks to Dough and Rene!

In a few days, I’ll be heading off for another yearly EuroBSDCon, this year in Karlsruhe, Germany. Unfortunately, I will have to leave on Sunday, but on Saturday you might find me at the FreeBSD Foundation booth in the booth area where we’ll have Foundation brochures and swag. Please drop by to give feedback, ask questions, and/or make a donation. Hope to see you there!

Again this year, the FOSDEM organization had reserved a DevRoom for the BSDs. I hadn’t been to FOSDEM for several years and was pleasantly surprised to see how many BSD developers and users had turned up.

Unfortunately, I did miss the first talk as the Sunday bus schedule clearly didn’t scale to the huge numbers of conference goers. The second talk was Ed Schouten on his Newcons project for FreeBSD. Of course, I was already familiar with the utmpx part of the project with ~100 ports failing on the cluster after those changes and we’re working together on fixing those. Ed showed some very promising performance improvements and much better UTF-8 non-ASCII support, although some fonds do need more work.

Benny Siegert introduced some of the nitty-gritty of autotools and libtool to ease software portability over multiple platforms. While some of the most hated parts in the ports world, they are by far an improvement over previous tools and, especially, manual development.

Next up was Shteryana Shopova showing how to debug the FreeBSD kernel with the large number of tools provided by the operating system. With generous amounts of examples and demos, she gave a number of tips on which information to include when sending a problem report to the FreeBSD bug tracking database to get the best support from the FreeBSD developers, and even more important, how to collect that data out of a crashed system.

A face seen at most european BSD-related conferences over the last many years, Marc Balmer presented a case study of using BSD Unix and BSD licensed software in a commercial setting, talking both of the advantages of the BSD license over other licenses (illustrated by the number of words in the license), the BSD development process and contributing code back to the project, and about the point of sale (POS) software his company makes on top of a BSD operating system.

By far the most popular talk with well over 80 attendees, Axel Beckert talked about the Debian/kFreeBSD project, building a Debian GNU userland on top of a FreeBSD kernel. While he spend some time to answer the biggest question of all: “Why?”, I’m not sure everybody was convinced by the answer: “Because we can”. Most people will probably still install Debian when they want Debian and FreeBSD if they want FreeBSD, there are some that consider this combination the best of both worlds. It will be interesting to follow how the project will develop in the future.

Treading carefully not the restart the version control system wars of old, Giorgos Keramidas showed how he tracked the FreeBSD subversion changes in his local Mercurial setup. Some of the speedups of having the changes locally in a Mercurial repository over a remote subversion system were quite impressive, and the combination does provide some advantages for people wanting to develop proprietary changes locally while still easily being able to import upstream changes.

Last but not least was Brooks Davis with a short presentation on his current work to increase the number of groups a process (and thus user) can be a member of. The historic lessons on how FreeBSD and other Unices handled this was both hilarious and sad at the same time, but with the number already increased from ~15 to 1023 in 8.0 and going forward to not having any limit at all, the future looks bright.

In all, a very interesting and well-attended BSD track at FOSDEM this year. Many thanks to the FOSDEM organizers for providing the room and to Marius Nünnerich for inviting the speakers. I hope to be there again next year.

After the final preparations have been wrapped up, FreeBSD 8.0 is a fact and ready for download or upgrade. The all the new features and improvements are too numerous to mention, ranging from networking, scalability, virtualization, wireless, ZFS to USB. See the official announcement, or even better, a comprehensive article by Remko Lodder, for more information.