Two New Videos: SuperPages and NanoBSD

Thanks to Kirk McKusick, I'm happy to announce two new fully edited high quality videos from BSDCan 2011 in the BSD Conferences YouTube channel. I've also created a new playlist for the BSDCan 2011 videos.

The first talk is "Superpages in FreeBSD" by McKusick, and it describes the addition of superpage support to the FreeBSD 8 kernel on the Intel PC architecture. Superpages aggregate together standard-sized hardware pages into much larger "superpages". Each superpage requires only one entry in the page table replacing the numerous entries used by the standard-sized hardware pages.



The second talk is "Updates from NanoBSD: FreeNAS drives NanoBSD development" from Warner Losh, and it describes the basics of NanoBSD and how FreeNAS moved over to NanoBSD.



We now have 108 high-quality videos in the BSD Conferences channel. These videos have been watched in aggregate over 400,000 times, and our most popular video remains McKusick's FreeBSD Kernel Internals Lecture.

As a reminder, this channel was setup specifically for the BSD technical community and does not have the standard limitations on video size for other types of YouTube uploads. If you have additional video content from a conference, presentation, or class about BSD Unix please get in touch and I'd be happy to help you publish the content here.

BSDCan on Google's Open Source Blog

A coworker of mine, Kirk Russell, just posted an excellent summary of BSDCan through the years on the Google Open Source Blog.

I wasn't able to make it to BSDCan this year due to family commitments, but I did make it to another open source conference later this summer that I also wrote about on Google's open source blog.

Kirk and I haven't worked closely together but we both do our best at evangelizing BSD and open source inside our respective corners of the company. It's great to see his post about all the excellent work happening in the BSD community on a corporate blog.

Kirk McKusick on Journaling Soft Updates in FreeBSD

Dr. Kirk McKusick has produced a high quality recording of his talk on Journaled Soft-Updates at BSDCan 2010. This is the 92nd BSD conference video in the BSD Conferences YouTube channel.

New Channel on YouTube for BSD Technical Content

Thanks to help from the Open Source Program Office at Google I was able to setup a new channel for technical BSD content without the 10 minute limit for uploaded videos. This allows us to upload high quality full hour-long videos of talks and tutorials from BSD Conferences. I've added the first four videos that Julian Elisher taped from the MeetBSD 2008 conference we recently held in Mountain View. You can view these videos at www.youtube.com/bsdconferences.

Back in April I posted here about my desire to see our video content from technical conferences available on YouTube to reach a broader audience. At the time I was impressed that we had over 10,000 views for the FreeBSD vs Linux TechTV clip, but in 8 months that number of views has reached nearly 30,000. We would be hard pressed to reach that many people by hosting the videos with the FreeBSD web site. Hosting on YouTube also brings the advantage of having clips from these videos show up in the search results for related queries, which you may be able to see with a query such as [freebsd linux techtv], and which will presumably soon be visible with queries like [freebsd clustering meetbsd].

If anyone has additional video content from previous BSD conferences that they would like to upload please let me know. I'd particularly like to see some of the talks from recent BSDCan, AsiaBSDCon, and EuroBSDCon that I missed. Thanks again to Julian for video taping so much of this content.

I leave you with Brooks Davis on Isolating Cluster Jobs for Performance and Predictability :



- Murray

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.

finstall alpha4 review

finstall is Ivan Voras's installer project for FreeBSD. His goal is to create a more user friendly, extensible, and maintainable replacement for the venerable sysinstall program. Replacing sysinstall is something that has been near and dear to my heart since I was first granted a commit bit to work on sysinstall over 8 years ago.

In the past decade a number of projects (libh, anyone?) have been initiated with the goal of replacing sysinstall and none have succeeded. Ivan began his 2007 Summer of Code project with a survey of the existing BSD/Linux installer landscape and his finstall project aims to provide functionality not possible with the alternatives while avoiding some of the pitfalls.

Today Ivan gave a presentation about finstall at the FreeBSD Developer Summit preceding BSDCan but work is keeping me in San Francisco until Friday. Since I'm missing the in person discussions about finstall and FreeBSD 8.0 I thought I'd at least download the latest ISO and publish my findings here. The latest code for finstall is available on SourceForge but Ivan also provides ISO images on his blog.

The first thing you'll notice is that the installer is LiveCD based. Sysinstall was traditionally installed from boot floppy disks or as floppy images on El-Torrito bootable CDs. This led to the use of crunchgen(1) and other techniques for keeping the size of the installation environment within the confines of 1.44MB disks.

Freed from this anachronism, finstall boots into FreeBSD 7.0 and provides a login prompt where users can login as root to use the disk as a LiveCD / recovery CD, or as install to complete an installation onto local disk.

Immediately after logging in as install, the user is prompted to choose a keymap and timezone using the same text libdialog(3) based tools that sysinstall users are familiar with. There is no back button if you accidentally choose the wrong keymap, and no easy way to intuitively scroll through the long list of options in each menu. Thankfully, these are the only two parts of the system that still rely on libdialog(3).

After the timezone is selected, X Windows starts up and the user is dropped into an XFce desktop with a 'FreeBSD Install' icon. Selecting this icon launches the graphical installer. Only the novice (minimum interaction) menu item is available, but standard and advanced modes which allow for RAID configuration are being worked on.

The novice installation process sets up a default partition layout based on the available space on the drive selected by the user, without allowing the user to change the partitions in any way. On my 4 GB VMWare image it chose 512MB /, 409MB /var, 256MB swap, 2048MB /usr, and 865MB /home. The user is then given a choice of file systems to use (UFS+SU, UFS+GJ, ZFS, ext2). finstall refuses to install on a disk with less than 2.3GB of space. This seems excessive until you realize that the current version isn't going to give you the option of pruning down the installed package set -- everything on the ISO will be installed.

After file system selection, the installation begins with the format/partitioning of the disk, installation of the base system, and installation of all the packages on the LiveCD. During installation a number of helpful system tips are provided to the user beneath the status bar ("BSD stands for ...", pointers to the FreeBSD Handbook, etc..)

After installation is completed the user is asked to enter a root password, create a user account, setup network interfaces, and enable system daemons. These configuration menus are pretty standard but are much more user friendly than the sysinstall equivalents.

After installation, the user is left at the XFce desktop. It would probably be more useful at this point to actually reboot into the newly installed system. Perhaps the last message of the installer could say something like "Click here to reboot into your new FreeBSD 7.0 system."

This post is far longer than I expected so I'll end here, and follow up tomorrow with some specific suggestions that I'd like to see added to finstall. In the mean time, by all means check out the code on SourceForge and send Ivan your patches.