Remaining AsiaBSDCon 2009 Videos Posted

The remaining 9 videos from AsiaBSDCon 2009 have been posted. The new videos include talks by Theo de Raadt, Eric Allman, Kris Moore, Mohamad Fauzie, Brooks Davis, Atillio Rao, A. Kantee, and the Works In Progress Sessions.

• AsiaBSDCon 2009:The OpenBSD Release Process: A Success Story, Theo de Raadt
  
• AsiaBSDCon 2009: Internet Mail — Past, Present, and (a bit of) the Future, Eric Allman
  
• Kris Moore: PC-BSD - Making FreeBSD on the Desktop a reality
  
• Mohamad Dikshie Fauzie: FreeBSD and SOI-Asia Project
  
• Isolating Cluster Users for Performance and Predictability, Brooks Davis
  
• A. Rao: The Locking Infrastructure in the FreeBSD kernel #2
  
• A. Rao: The Locking Infrastructure in the FreeBSD kernel #1
  
• A. Kantee: Environmental Independence: BSD Kernel TCP/IP
  
• Work-in-Progress Session in AsiaBSDCon 2009
  

Thanks again to Hiroki Sato for posting the videos and organizing 3 consecutive years of successful AsiaBSDCons. Sato-san has also created two separate YouTube playlists for the AsiaBSDCon 2008 and AsiaBSDCon 2009 videos. These playlists make it easier to find the newest videos from among the 66 videos now in the BSDConferences YouTube channel.

20 FreeBSD Summer of Code Students Announced

Leslie Hawthorne from Google today announced the students selected to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code. Among the 1,000 students from 70 countries participating in this program, 20 will be working on FreeBSD projects, 11 on NetBSD projects, and 5 on DragonFly BSD projects.

Keep an eye on the FreeBSD wiki and mailing lists for more information about these projects over the summer. Congratulations to Robert Watson, Brooks Davis, and Tim Kientzle for pairing up mentors and students for this year's FreeBSD applications :

• Student: alejandro pulver
  Project: Ports license infrastructure (part 2: integration)
  Mentor: Erwin Lansing


• Student: Ana Kukec
  Project: IPv6 Secure Neighbor Discovery - native kernel APIs for FreeBSD
  Mentor: Bjoern A. Zeeb


• Student: sylvestre gallon
  Project: USB improvements under FreeBSD
  Mentor: Philip Paeps


• Student: David Forsythe
  Project: Package tools rewrite via a new package library, with new features
  Mentor: Tim Kientzle


• Student: Fabio Checconi
  Project: Geom-based Disk Schedulers
  Mentor: Luigi Rizzo


• Student: Fang Wang
  Project: Implement TCP UTO
  Mentor: Rui Paulo


• Student: Gabor Kovesdan
  Project: BSD-licensed libiconv in base system
  Mentor: Xin LI


• Student: Ilias Marinos
  Project: Application-Specific Audit Trails
  Mentor: Robert Watson


• Student: marta carbone
  Project: Ipfw and dummynet improvements
  Mentor: Luigi Rizzo


• Student: Prashant Vaibhav
  Project: Reworking the callout scheme: towards a tickless kernel
  Mentor: Ed Maste


• Student: nikhil bysani
  Project: Porting NetworkManager to FreeBSD
  Mentor: Ed Schouten


• Student: gabor janos pali
  Project: Design and Implementation of Subsystem Support Libraries for Monitoring and Management
  Mentor: Oleksandr Tymoshenko


• Student: Satish Srinivasan
  Project: TrustedBSD Audit: Developing BSD licensed tools for importing, exporting from/to Linux audit log format and BSM.
  Mentor: Stacey Son


• Student: tatsiana severyna
  Project: puffs (pass-to-userspace framework file system) port for FreeBSD
  Mentor: Konstantin Belousov


• Student: edward napierala
  Project: Hierarchical Resource Limits
  Mentor: Brooks Davis


• Student: aditya sarawgi
  Project: Improving Second Extended File system (ext2fs) and making it GPL free.
  Mentor: Ulf Lilleengen


• Student: Zhao Shuai
  Project: FIFO Optimizations
  Mentor: John Baldwin


• Student: Zachariah Riggle
  Project: TCP\IP Regression Testing Suite
  Mentor: George Neville-Neil


• Student: gleb kurtsov
  Project: In kernel stackable cryptographic filesystem (ownfs)
  Mentor: Stanislav Sedov


• Student: tatsiana elavaya
  Project: ipfw ruleset optimization and highlevel rule definition language
  Mentor: Diomidis Spinellis

A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem

Two new videos are available from AsiaBSDCon 2008, including :

* A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem, Kirk McKusick.
* Using FreeBSD to Promote Open Source Development Methods, Brooks Davis

It has been less than two months since I posted Dr. Kirk McKusick's Kernel Internals video and the popularity of this video has been stunning. The 11,000 views in less than 2 months makes it by far the most popular video in the bsdconferences channel.

New Summer of Code Administrators

Brooks Davis and Tim Kientzle have volunteered to help Robert Watson organize the FreeBSD participation in the Google Summer of Code program this year. After 4 consecutive years of running the program with Robert, I wanted to step aside to let others organize things this year. Brooks and Tim were excellent mentors in previous years and had lots of good ideas for improving the experience for mentors and students alike so I wish them well and am confident we'll have another successful Summer of Code. Please send all of your summer of code inquiries to soc-admins@ rather than me personally, and don't forget to spread the word about this program among potential mentors and students. Brooks, Robert, and Tim will follow up with more details about the timeline, etc.

Strong BSD Showing at GSoC Mentor Summit

This weekend is the Google Summer of Code mentor summit. As in previous years, Google flew out a number of representatives from over a hundred open source projects to talk and brainstorm about making Summer of Code better.


The activities started last night with a hosted dinner at Amarin Thai restaurant, followed by a reception at the Tied House in downtown Mountain View (with open bar!). Kris Kennaway was visiting Google in Mountain View this past week and so was able to join us for drinks and meet some FreeBSD and Open Source developers before flying out Saturday morning. Among many others we met up with Cat Allman, Leslie Hawthorne, Pawel Solyga, Todd Larsen, Randi Harper, James Youngman, Eivind Eklund, and others. Todd and Pawel are working on the next generation summer of code web application, Melange, which will be open source and built on App Engine.

Saturday I arrived late as usual to the mentor summit. I met up with Rafal Jaworowski, Brooks Davis, and Tim Kientzle. I ran into Jeffrey Hsu representing the DragonFly BSD group, and Jacob Appelbaum and Roger Dingledine from the Tor project. Jacob worked with Bill Paul and others on the Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys work and has built a community hacker space in San Francisco. It was also great to bump into Phil Jenvey who used to work with me at Walnut Creek CDROM and BSDi a decade ago, and is now working on Jython.


In the morning I attended a session about bringing new developers into Open Source. After lunch I attended a session on the state of open source scientific computing, and I'm typing this as I prepare for the next session on Melange. Based on the discussions so far I've started writing some more process documentation for how we can run the Summer of Code program more efficiently next summer, including a Student Checklist. Apologies for the blurry photos taken in low light on an iPhone.

There are more sessions this evening and tomorrow, when Sam Leffler is expected to join us. I'll post again after the conclusion of the summit.

BSDCan Trip Report

BSDCan wrapped up yesterday and I'm back in the SF Bay Area. As usual, Dan did a great job organizing everything. A scheduling conflict prevented me from attending the developer summit before the conference, but I was mostly able to sync up with those working in areas of interest. Some of my highlights from this year's conference include :

• Having lunch with Bosko. I hadn't seen him since USENIX 2004 and he hasn't been around the FreeBSD development community much recently but previously did a lot of work on TCP and it was great to catch up with him.


• Discussing finstall with Ivan. I reviewed his latest alpha4 ISO image and provided additional feedback in person about what I think the priorities should be for getting this to the point of being the default installer for FreeBSD 8.0. Downloaded the code from sourceforge and discussed PyGTK interface for selecting/installing packages. I think I volunteered to implement a few menus, doh!


• Talking with Denise (iXsystems), Leslie (Google), and others about doing a MeetBSD Conference at Google in Mountain View in November. More details to follow once facilities are confirmed. Open source gatherings at the googleplex usually work pretty well, with free food, wireless, and copious conference rooms available.


• Dinner with Mike Silbersack, Doug Rabson, and Zach Loafman (Isilon) about Kerberized NFS, NFSv4, Microsoft, and general kvetching.


• Recording a BSDTalk podcast with the rest of the FreeBSD Core Team in attendance (not yet posted, audio coming soon).


• Talking with Deb from the FreeBSD Foundation about fundraising and more prominent links to the foundation website from www.freebsd.org.


• Discussing the pending Subversion conversion of the FreeBSD CVS repository and the necessary updates to our committer guide.


• Drinking a very nice single malt scotch with Brooks Davis and others in the hacker lounge late into the night, teasing Kip Macy, and learning all about some fine San Francisco establishments from George Neville-Neil.


• And of course, in addition to the hallway track there were actually lots of interesting talks such as Chris Lattner on BSD Licensed C++ compiler, LLVM, John Baldwin on kernel debugging, and Leslie Hawthorne on Summer of Code.