[nycbug-talk] Day 2, EuroBSDCon 2007 report

[Isaac Levy]

Hey All,

Day 2 was awesome!

The morning, I missed some things- Brooks Davis was detained, so the  
morning got off to a rocky start... and he didn't get to give his  
talk about Open Source in his company.  In the meantime Yvan  
Vanhullebus gave a talk about how they use BSD at their firewall  
company in France.

John Hartmann's keynote was an INSANELY COOL SURPRISE.
He gave a talk about CMS pipes, "Real mens pipes", and how they  
differ from UNIX pipes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmann_pipeline
http://vm.marist.edu/~pipeline/

Think IBM Denmark, 1970's.  Totally mind-blowing fun.

Then, Kirk did "A Brief History of the BSD Fast Filesystem", I'd seen  
it before, so I went to see Gregers Petersen talk about Open Source  
and property.  It was a great talk, however I was surprised to see  
such a talk at a technical conference.  However, he spoke mostly  
about historical observations about culture, value, trust... in  
relation to property- and there was a hearty discussion afterwards.

Then came the big excitement- Pawel Jakub Dawidek, "FreeBSD and ZFS".
I saw this talk in Tokyo, Pawel had just ported Sun's ZFS to  
FreeBSD.  Now at this point, it will take some time, but this is the  
first SIGNIFIGANT improvement over UFS in the *BSD world in many  
years.  His presentation (and his work) was so good, it even got the  
attention of many of the OpenBSD developers I spoke to, (who will  
remain anonymous :).
The features, performance, and implementation are hard to ignore- and  
it's running stable in the 7-CURRENT branch.
I can't tell everyone how INSANELY COOL this is.  Also, Pawel got  
some animation help from a friend, the talk was really well done.
Kirk McKusick is even excited...

Antti Kantee and Allistair Crooks did a talk about ReFuise,  
"Userspeace FUSE Reimplementation using puffs"- which I wanted to  
see, because I know nothing about it- but instead, I saw George  
Neville-Neil talk about "Network Protocol Testing in FreeBSD and in  
General"- which was awesome.  He showed off his test suite for  
network stack testing, as well as discussing his VAST experiences  
with network protocol implementation, leading to the tools creation...

Then the fun...

They did a '3rd party software deathmatch', had people from various  
ports teams present their systems, and everyone voted on them:

They got some good sport Gentoo guys, a Debian guy, a Pkgsrc guy, an  
OpenBSD guy, and a FreeBSD guy (brooks davis) to present a short  
snipped on the system.  Much booing, cheering, and heckling for this  
competition- and FreeBSD ports won out in the end.  Will post the  
votes if I hear them again.
All in all, the voting was not serious, (the judges wore devilish  
costumes, and were openly bribed with Beer by the OpenBSD guy),  
so...  A very good way to end the conference.

--
Everyone who helped, the DKUUG, everyone- deserve so much mention:

Flemming Frøkjær
Flemming Jacobsen
Lars Thegler
Poul-Henning Kamp
Sidsel Jensen
Simon L. Nielsen
Kristen Nielsen
Lennart Sorth
Robert Watson
Ole Guldberg Jensen
Michael Knudsen
Emmanuel Dreyfus

Everyone worked SO hard, and the conference was awesome.

Today, we go to Legoland in about 10 minutes, I'll report back later...

I'll be at the FreeBSD developers summit, somewhere out in the  
country, for the next 2 days before I come home, working on some  
personal projects...

/salute

Rocket-
.ike