Date: Mon, 2 Dec 1996 16:26:27 -0800 (PST) From: "Jonathan M. Bresler" <jmb> To: freebsd-hackers, freebsd-chat Subject: EurOpen.SE: FreeBSD Presentation, trip report Message-ID: <199612030026.QAA23882@freefall.freebsd.org>
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This is a (belated) trip report of my FreeBSD presentation at EurOpen.SE. There are several sections. The first does the "reporter's questions": who?, where?, when?, and what?. The second are some observations on making presentations. And the final section approximates some of my spoken remarks. The slides from the presentation are available on freefall. ftp://freefall.freebsd.org/pub/incoming/sweden.slides.ps ================================================================= On October 24th and 25th, EurOpen.SE (the Swedish National Unix Users' Group) held its annual conference. The topic for discussion was "Free Unix as your Internet Server -- the best alternative?". The conference was held at the Grand Hotel Saltsjobaden, located approximately 15 miles east of Stockholm, Sweden. Fifty-three people attended the conference, mainly from commercial companies rather than universities or not-for-profit organizations. Attendees included two people from The United States Information Service based at the US embassy in Stockholm and two from the Swedish Department of Defense. Bjorn Olofsson of the Lulea Universitet, site of the FreeBSD mirror in Sweden, also attended. The program included speakers representing FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSDI, Linux (two presentations, one on Debian and the other on RedHat/Slackware/Yggdrsil), SCO, Sun, Microsoft, and Tele2/Swipnet (the largest network access provider in Sweden). Each speaker had a 90 minute time slot. The Microsoft representative was ill and was not able to participate. His time was divided among myself speaking about the Hint benchmark (http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/scl/HINT/HINT.html), the Debian Linux speaker, Lars Wirzenius speaking about the Linux release mechanism and Magnus Redin of Signum Support AB speaking in Swedish. The first speaker was Olle Wallner of Tele2/Swipnet. Fortunately, I was the second speaker, so the audience was still fresh and mine was the first Unix talk. This is a tremendous advantage, all the other Unix speakers were forced to distinguish their product from FreeBSD. Hence, we received a lot of unexpected publicity as each speaker in turn mentioned their differences relative to FreeBSD. I stressed three characteristics of FreeBSD above all else: Networking Performance, Stability, and Support for the user community. The presentation addressed a range of issues. Due to the 90 minute time limit, several issues were not addressed as throughly as they deserved but rather mentioned as asides. First, a (partial) list of issues that I did not address in detail: laptop support, internationalization, and loadable kernel modules. To support our claim to networking performance, I described the workload and hardware configuration of wcarchive.cdrom.com. The last section contains this information. Those of you familiar with wcarchive may wish to skip that paragraph. I described the attention to detail and concern for quality that the core team and the developers of FreeBSD have demonstrated over the last three years. Our dedication to producing a "truly great operating system" and unwillingness to ship code that is anything less than the best we can make, it convinced the audience that FreeBSD is a system to be considered for any task that may arise. After all, many of us are professional software developers. We don't write FreeBSD to prove anything or to feed ourselves and our families, but rather to satisfy a desire to excel, to work in an environment without managers that speak of profits and deadlines. I avoided controversy and direct comparisons with other operating systems. When directly asked about "FreeBSD vs Product X", I replied that I had come to talk about FreeBSD and would be glad to discuss comparisons after the talk, but not as part of the presentation. Nonetheless, I maintained that the hardware available to the FreeBSD user community is remarkably fast and inexpensive, even though quality does vary greatly. One should choose carefully and not be reluctant to spend more for better equipment. After all, equipment from a hardware manufacturer that ships Unix would cost far more than the hardware required by FreeBSD. In response to a question from the audience regarding the perceived slowness of PC clones, I allowed myself one denigrated remark about Microsoft: "The hardware is fast and capable, its just the popular software that......." Now comes the hard part, talking about what I did well without being too modest or swinging too much the other direction. I displayed an level of enthusiasm, sincerity and confidence regarding FreeBSD that was compelling. A number of people came up to me after the presentation and characterized the my work as "excellent." Indeed, one of the other speakers said he was jealous of what I had accomplished. A number of commericial software developers may be switching to FreeBSD. One example is the compary that displays messages on illuminated signs in the subway and train stations. The messages are customized for each train when necessary. This system may be converted to FreeBSD in all new installations. The next paragraphs are my notes on the other operating systems presentations. NetBSD, Charles M. Hannum: NetBSD has been ported to 16 platforms, some of which I have never heard of before. The project goals are to field a complete, stable, portable, standards based system. But there is no ports tree or ports/packages mechanism. The only sections of source code that contain machine dependencies are limited portions of libc and the kernel. NetBSD sees itself a the follow-on the the Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California at Berkeley. As such, they intend to provide improvements in the quality of the code, and the level of abstraction in the code, as well as create THE reference BSD implementation. Charles provided a list of NetBSD firsts, such as the first BSD Unix on to support shared libraries. NetBSD provides binary compatibility for BSDI, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Interactive, Linux, SCO and others. Their plan it make one release a year; the release engineering so too complex given their number of platforms to prepare releases more frequently. NetBSD is made up of a core team and portmasters. The core team has the same functions as ours and the portmasters are responisble for applications (which does not jive well with the statement that there is not ports/packages mechanism, but such are my notes) The next big step for NetBSD is to move the kernel to a synchronous thread model. Each interrupt will have its own thread. The goal is to make the kernel much more like programming any multi-threaded program rather than the upper/lower model that we have now. Additional goals are: SMP, journaling on file systems (not the same as logfs), ELF, and kernel support of user threads. Debian Linux, Lars Wirzenius: Linux is one kernel, but many distributions and a least a couple C libraries. The kernel is controlled by Linus Torvalds but the distributions are independent efforts, each is structured as the distributor sees fit. Linux now has a unified buffer cache and virtual memory system. Linux is available for x86, dec alpha, sparc and mc68k, but only the x86 version is stable. Linux has replaced fork(2) with the system call clone(2), the Linux version of fork(2) is actually a wrapper around clone(2). clone(2) allows selective sharing of resources between the parent and child processes. Linux has one release a year, but allows complete access to the development code. The majority of people run the development code rather than any official release. Debian is very proud of its package system, which is quite powerful. It recognized a number of dependency levels, from "must-have" to "suggested" additions to the package that is being installed. BSDI, Peter Hakansson of Volvo, Data Department: Peter spoke in Swedish and so I understood very little of his presentation. The presentation was low key, so low key that at times I could not hear him. I sat at the back of the room. SCO, David Gurr of SCO Great Britain: SCO is moving to a 64-bit architecture, the Gemini chip, also known as the P7. This chip is a joint development effort of Intel and Hewlett-Packard. SCO supports clustering of workstations as a method of providing reliability. SCO feels that it owns the point-of-sale market and plans to expand its presence in this area. SCO wishes to push of a unified Unix, now that SCO is receiving royalties from all SVR4 and SVR3 versions of Unix, except Sun, they feel that they are in a position to "strongly encourage" others to move with them "as to what is and what is not" Unix. The presentation was done in PowerPoint and presented using a laptop computer and a projector gizmo that plugged into the external video DB-15 connector of the laptop. The result was aesthetically unappealing--just too dark to read easily. RedHat/Slackware/Yggdrsil, Magnus Redin of Signum Support AB: Spoke in Swedish. Slides handwritten on location. I have no idea what he said ;( Sun Microsystems: Also in Swedish, again I did not understand enough to comment. Microsoft: The Microsoft representative fell ill and was not able to come to the conference to make his presentation. This opened up a 90 minute hole in the schedule for the afternoon of the second day, October 25th. The hole had to be filled. The summary panel discussion was scheduled for 4:00pm and the representative of Tele2/Swipnet would not return until then. General comments on Swedes, the hotel and other things: The accommodations were excellent. Those of you who have not stayed in a first-rate European hotel should find the opportunity to do so. No hotel that I know of in the United States compares. One example, the bathroom towel racks have an internal heating element--before stepping into the shower, turn on the heater and the thick, plush towels are wonderfully warm by the time that you finish showering. The Swedes are a tall people, average of six foot, 180 cm, and so all the furniture and fixtures are sized accordingly. My feet did not hang off the end of the bed ;). The Grand Hotel at Saltzjobaden is a large stately structure, situated on the water with a comfortable marina and beautiful island just offshore. There is a small bridge to the island. Access to Stockholm from the Baltic Sea is impeded by the largest archipelago in Europe. A wonderful place to sail and gunk-hole. (gunk-hole: to sail from one anchorage to another each day doing a little fishing, touring and bird watching along the way....sorta ;) Swedes study English, both written and spoken, in school from the third grade till 12th. The audience was very comfortable speaking in and listening to English (Thank goodness given my facility in Swedish. Vowels are different from English. An umlaut-o is not the same as a plain `o'. This is important when looking for a hotel located on the square called H<umlaut-o>rtoget in Stockholm. Substituting a regular `o' is a very different word ;) Needless to say, I spoke in English. ================================================================= Some general notes on making presentations: practice, out loud, in front of people, repeatedly. Know your material cold. Have a set of anecdotes that you can use to enliven the presentation and bring them out as needed. Don't try to cover everything, the presentation becomes either a laundry list or confusing swirl of items. Pick a theme and stick with it; return to the theme several times. Get the first presentation slot or at least the first slot of the second day. The first slot after lunch is tough; the second slot is a disaster. People that are digesting are prone to fall asleep in the middle of your talk. Eat lightly before speaking, but only lightly, not foods that are high in refined sugar content. Take a glass of water up to the podium. Speaking for 90 minutes without water will reduce your voice to a hoarse croak. (I did remember to take a glass of water with me.) Print out the notes along with the slides using the article format of the LaTeX seminar package. That way the notes are easier to use (both the slide and my notes are visible at the same time.) Highlight (either in color marker or some other highly visible manner) those items that are most important to discuss for each slide. Before beginning the seque into the next slide, take several seconds to review those points and make sure that each one has been addressed. ================================================================= The following paragraphs are an approximation of what i actually said to the audience on several issues: network performance, stability, and user support. These paragraphs are not exhaustive, rather indicative. This ftp/http server provides 70GB of data to the Internet, day in and day out. Its record day was 115GB. That averages 2.5 Megabytes/second during the day and 1.3 Megabytes/second all night long. During that 24 hour period, the run queue never exceeded 3.00 and interactive response on the console was snappy. The machine's output is limited by the ability of the Internet to accept data. US West, one of the baby bells, has chosen FreeBSD as the operating system to use in their Internet Service Provider business segment called !nterprise. US West, a $10 Billion dollar company with more than $1.2 Billion in profit, chose FreeBSD because of its stability. Due to the regulations that govern telephone companies, US West is forced to create a significant number of server sites. There are three sites in Minnesota alone. Each site has two machines, one provides news, the other does everything else. Many sites are "dark sites." No one is there to attend to reboot a crashed computer. The machines *must* stay up, otherwise someone will have to travel to the site to reboot the box. Flying into Fargo, North Dakota in February is not fun. FreeBSD maintains the principle of "least surprise" for our users. For example, shared libraries are phased out slowly, rather than disappearing suddenly with the next release. TCP/IP extensions can be enabled or disable easily by editing /etc/sysconfig. Using CVS, we can retrieve from the source code repository the code same code that any FreeBSD is using. Users often receive answers to their questions within 30 minutes from the time that they send mail to the FreeBSD mailing lists. No trouble tickets. No 800 numbers. Just answers. Should you ever find a problem with FreeBSD, please use send-pr(1) to send a problem report to us. These problem reports are logged in a database and retained until resolved. Problems that are mentioned informally in the mailing lists may be lost or remain unresolved. The mailing lists are not a substitute for the send-pr(1) command and the GNATS problem reporting and tracking system. ================================================================= jmb -- Jonathan M. Bresler FreeBSD Postmaster jmb@FreeBSD.ORG FreeBSD--4.4BSD Unix for PC clones, source included. http://www.freebsd.org/ PGP 2.6.2 Fingerprint: 31 57 41 56 06 C1 40 13 C5 1C E3 E5 DC 62 0E FB
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