Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:11:03 +0000 From: "Wojciech A. Koszek" <dunstan@freebsd.czest.pl> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: MeetBSD report.. Message-ID: <20061127131103.GA93662@FreeBSD.czest.pl>
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(Not so..) short summary related with meetBSD conference I hope you don't mind seeing me explaining, why it's quite cool to visit Poland next time we'll be hopefully having The MeetBSD conference here. What I find is the biggest problem is a language of presented talks; thus I wish I could propose some changes in a schedule of future confereces, so that papers presented in English were to be grouped in one day.. My observation is quite simple -- most of the people know English in listen/read-only manner very well, large group of them are fluent in speaking also. For now, let skip such problems -- we've had three English talks this year. This edition of the conference was also really interesting. Pawel was clever enough to put the most interesting (read: his) pieces first, so that he could relax later and listen to every talk with a tea in hand, and chat with a girl, who of course noone could even glance at, and really, noone even could confirm her existance. Presentation related to his work regarding data integrity in the context of integration with GELI was interesting, especially for non-GEOM hackers, who even if follow CVS logs, don't really get what provider-related magic is about. He seems to use a trick of typing commands in the front of the audience, which is the best proof that something is already working well and appears to work in front of the people's eyes without saying "foo bar, I'm unhappy OS kernel". Later there were several technical talks which I found interesting: Mariusz Grad had almost interative presentation on which you were able to see how does the typical extension like MMX on the 32-bit architecture can possitively impact application performance (based on his benchmark) together with explaining, why the physicians being obssesed with martix manipulation in his departament like 64-bit processing so much. He likes going deep into the computer architecture, and I had a longer talk with him after the conference. He also included several historical aspects of computer architecture and mentioned some really cool notes from Von Neumann's paper he was lucky enough to read somewhere in Berlin. Jakub Klausa has lead a talk about Voice over IP in the context of FreeBSD. I'm not an expert in that field, and actually, I have never played with VoIP seriously, but huge number of questions after the talk finally made me think, that this has to be really, really interesting for an audience. I use to work on setting some basic setups with GNU Gatekeeper and H323 protocol, thus I woke up when those names were mentioned. Otherwise, I can't explain to you what have been touched, except of various terms like: SS7, VoiceXML, VoIP, Asterisk, and many, many more. Jakub was kind enough to borrow me a laptop for my presentation, since as always when I need my own machine, in lies broken down in a computer shop for several days before a conference, and the ugly repleacement I've been given doesn't handle the external output with any kind of resolution. After Jakub, Paulo had his 45 minutes. Since I like strictly technical bits, I liked it very much. Just like with others work -- I can't follow and understand everything by myself, so his show was very usefull for me. And I'm happy that we're growing some nice neatures. After Paulo's talk, Steven Jurczyk came onto the scene. Steven is a founder of the home.pl -- the most famous and the biggest Polish hosting provider, which is entirely powered by FreeBSD. Just like anyone else, we were looking forward to hear Steve's talk, since not everyone has enough chance to play with 200 FreeBSD boxes and solve problems in the farm of that size. Steve honestly talked about possitive and negative sides of being FreeBSD consument. The final statement was that they are very happy with FreeBSD, which not only does what they really want, but also seem to move to the right direction. As a proof several dedicated solutions have been written by home.pl and deployed in their FreeBSD environment. After the talk there were also several question related with various sides of system administration. Then was my talk. There is nothing special to talk about at this point -- I don't really like a quality of my presentations. This time I decided to take a brief look at my small impact on current state of FreeBSD/mips, together with giving a credits to people like Oleksandr Tymoshenko and Olivier Houchard, who is my mentor in The Project. I mentioned about why do I think the MIPS architecture is interesting, and how '#if 0' can help a the first stages of development. Finally, what most of the people were looking forward used to happen -- first day of the conference has been closed, and the Social Even was about to start. After short travel, we landed in a place, that looked like a Star Trek board. Music was a little bit too loud, but the fact of having everyone in the one place worked well. Thus, I had no problem to chat with Paulo and Mark several times :-) After whole day, they also had to keep up with several technical questions asked by me. I hope they didn't mind. I can't say how the event really looked like (yeah -- you have to come hear in order to expirience it by yourself), but there were several suprises prepared by the organizers; and I belive due to Polish tea and other customs, audience also seemed to have a good time. The party for me was over at 2 A.M. I took a bus at 2:20, and around 3:00 I was close to the destination place. After having a short walk with a wrong direction taken, I reach the destination place at about 3:30 A.M. This part was over. Second day meant carrying huge luggage caused by some shopping the day befire the meetBSD started. Until most of people were in the conference room, first talk was delayed by couple of minutes, but Pawel did some magic trick with explaining, why ZFS is a kind of next-generation aspect of filesystems, and of course, he showed everything by an example, while logging on a remote box and presenting, that we already have ZFS working on FreeBSD. Mark's talk was next. Mark mentioned about social and technical aspects related with ports collection, their maintainance, fixing, build breakages; he also explained several bits of FreeBSD jorgon like "pointy hat" meaning; there were also some number which I was not familiar with before, like for example length of typical port build, and number of ports that build properly. Several questions regarding his work and general point of view on ports collection have been asked. Mark talk was followed by Lukasz Bromirski presentation. I truly admire this man, since he's walking networking encyclopedia, multiinstrumental artist and real expert when it comes to network managment, network administration and security. He's big FreeBSD fan, and this time he talked about network monitoring with FreeBSD and tools available in our ports collection. Professionally, Lukasz is related with Cisco Systems Inc., and I belive he often has to prepare such presenations. Hence, the quality of a content and the way it is served always makes me think that the right person is in the right place. I'm not sure how he does this, but even with small delay and time shortened, he seems to exactly fit given timeline. Dinner meant a bit of general conversiation with Mark and Paulo which I enjoyed, really. Actually, it was long enough to be a bit late on the next talk from the schedule.. Pawel Rutkowski, who is collegue of mine and big FreeBSD fan and beliver, presented BGP deployment in a corporation network. Everything was based on his real-life expirience. I'm not sure what the earlier slides were about, but the ones I've seen touched a topic of Quagga, and some performace measurement. Professionaly Pawel was related with work on high availability servers powered by FreeBSD for big hosting companies. Several questions appeared, but I know Pawel was quite busy for both of a days of conference, due to dozens of questions regarding his earlier talks about a way of making backups on FreeBSD. I actually was a bit affraid of the last presentation, since my train was supposed to be at a station at 17:45, and the presentation started with small delay, but everything went fine -- Paulo, speaking about the interrupt stuff and the way he managed to solve interrupt lattency problem was what I've been looking forward. I appears to be quite nice mechanism, and hopefully we'll have it commited soon. I also had a talk with Paulo the day before, and he explained me some bits of his research. The presentation visualised everything, which I like, of course. I listened to Paulo stuff to the end, said "bye" to the organizers and run away. Additional comments: Almost on every Polish conference organized lastly misterious man related more or less with GNU propaganda had to appear. So an audience took several questions like "why don't you have XYZ in the kernel instead of implementing it in the user-space", and the notion of "Linux being better because..". Just like on every BSD-related conference, high level of professionalism was shown and none of meritorical questions has been left unanswered. Not sure why, but there is also a kind of a situation on Polish conferences, where people are affraid of asking in the front of other people, and they prefer to ask questions privately from some reasons. Thus, once you decide to present something in Poland, don't feel wrong when no hand are raised after the last slide -- this simply means you'll be more busy after the talk :-) Things I forgotten about.. Sponsors and the organizers did a really, really well job in the field of gadgets. People were messing with meetBSDish T-shirts and meetBSDish (poloar) sweatchirts or various sizes, meetBSDish mugs, meetBSDish glasses. We've been given also a hip flask, which I'm not sure if is properly translated by me, but maybe someone will take a photo of what I have in mind :-) Not sure how this might look like after a conferece, but you should try to get some of this things in order to confirm I'm not wrong :-) Final result was that the second day was really, really daemon-powered. home.pl was kind enough to buy mouse pads for every single person. The guys were very friendy on their stall, and answered zillions of questions regarding huge amount of traffic, extreme number of queries and keeping the staff going in the company over and over again. They brought a box that is supposed to act as their backup server. Steven was kind enough to share some bits of his knowledge with me, since they deployed their own, high-performance, WWW, FreeBSD mechanisms-based server into practice. home.pl also has their site available in English. PAComp was a second sponsor of the meetBSD conference. Those guys were the ones I talked with for a *long* period of time, since some serious hackery happens behind their company's stage. They have presented their own hardware, PowerPC-based platform destined to the cryptographic solutions and a working port of FreeBSD for such processor, together with their "ready-to-be-put-on-the-shelf" product. We talked about assemblers, PCB boards, porting methodology, DSP processors, RISC architecture, opcodes, register windows and dozen of different stuff. They also mentioned about drivers for FreeBSD for their hardware (finally I'm not sure whether the RFID reader was there, but I'm sure I've seen chip card reader working). I really missed their lack presentation, but they promised to present their work after project will reach it's destination phase. Hardly working people from Wheel.pl not only carried a huge ammount of work on keeping everything going in the right way, but also presented their authorization system called Cerb. It's major advantage is that you're no longer forced to carry dozen of simple passwords in our memory, but protect them with a know-something and have-something notion (mobile phone in their case). We did sample test-case, and it worked without a problem on my mobile phone. Guys from hack.pl portal won an auction of Dru Lavigne's book signed by Pawel, me, Paulo and Mark (the price reached a level of about 150 Euros..). In order to see why the FreeBSD community thinks the keyboard is universal way of expressing yourself, take a look at: http://hack.pl/gfx/meetbsd2006/bsd1.jpg Money will be spend entirely on supporting The FreeBSD Foundation. Right now you might have a feeling why the meetBSD is rather cool event to take part in. Thanks, -- Wojciech A. Koszek wkoszek@FreeBSD.org http://FreeBSD.czest.pl/dunstan/
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