Year: 2024

The first official BSDCan 2024 event — the Goat BoF — takes place two weeks from today. The Goat BoF is an informal gathering for early arrivals and yes, there is a goat.

The University of Ottawa guest network restricts outbound traffic to TCP ports 80 and 443. We have requested they open the network for us. Some years our request is granted, sometimes not. Like many folks who travel frequently, you might consider running an SSH server on port 80 and 443.

We are seeking volunteers to help staff the registration desk! Most everyone should have registered before the conference, but someone has to mark names off the list and help haul T-shirts and bags into the event. We need help:

• Thursday afternoon and evening in the Hacker Lounge (U90 Lobby Lounge), 3PM-7PM. This includes sorting out T-shirts and putting sponsor materials in the swag bags, as well as handling early registration, so this needs 5-6 people.
• Friday morning, 2 people in the DMS lobby, 8AM-10AM.
• Saturday morning, 1 person in the DMS lobby, 9AM-11AM.

If you’re interested, please reply to this message.

We also have a newcomers orientation and membership session Thursday night at 6PM, in the same Hacker Lounge. If you’ve never been to BSDCan before, our fifteen-minute talk will help orient you and give you a chance to meet old hands who are volunteering to help ease you into the community.

Finally, you should know that UO has active protestors encamped near the conference. We strongly urge you to leave them alone. Interfering with a protest is a great way to attract police attention. As a general rule, BSDCan staff cannot help you in legal matters.

Two weeks. See you soon!
Michael W Lucas
BSDCan 2024 Chair

Twenty-two days! If you are coming from a country other than the USA, you should start thinking about getting your eTA Real Soon Now(tm) – they’re quite backed up right now.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/visit-canada/eta/apply.html While the committee’s goal is to keep BSDCan largely traditional, you should be aware of a few changes.

Most everyone goes for shwarma at some point, so we might as well bring it to you. For Friday lunch! If you registered a guest, they are welcome to join us for lunches and snacks.

Speaking of guests, if you register them they get a shirt and badge as well as lunch. If the guest shirt option wasn’t on the form when you registered, contact registration@bsdcan.org with their size. Fitted shirts are available.

If this is your first BSDCan, try to come to the newcomers session at 6PM Thursday in the Hacker Lounge (in the lobby lounge of the U90 Residence Hall). It’s only ten minutes long, and at the end experienced volunteers can guide you to the people you want to meet and the places you want to see.

If this isn’t your first BSDCan, and you want to welcome newcomers and help ease them into our community, please come to the Hacker Lounge at 6PM Thursday for the newcomers session.

Tutorial attendees are sharing a lunch buffet with the FreeBSD Developer Summit rather than the traditional boxed lunches.

If you haven’t seen the schedule, take a look at https://indico.bsdcan.org/event/1/timetable/#all.detailed. Five tutorials, four talk tracks, and on Tuesday night: a goat.

We look forward to seeing you all in Ottawa!

We would like to invite everyone to join us 28 May-1 June 2024 for the twentieth year of BSDCan!

Register now to experience:

• The fabulous Goat BOF, the evening of May 28!
• Tutorials! Tutorials! Tutorials! May 29-30
• The BSDCan Eve registration hangout!
• Two days of talks from open source luminaries! May 31-June 1
• The glorious last night party!

It’s a new registration system, so we’re rolling it out in phases. Speakers have been asked to register, but you’re next. Don’t wait, register now.

(by Pamela Mosiejczuk and Michael W Lucas)

 

We just sent out submission acceptances and rejections. We’re months out from the conference and everything can change, but if everything works out we’re gonna have a great con. So let’s talk about rejection.

Conferences reject submissions for reasons. Submitters feel that those talks get rejected for completely different reasons. It’s not that unaccepted talks are bad. Conferences generally weed out a very few submissions where the abstract was not of a quality/completeness that we could actually judge, sure, but these committees aren’t gauging your worth like an academic board. We’re tasked with creating a lineup like a programming block for television.

After years of working with poster sessions, colloquium, and conference scheduling, especially for BSD conferences, here are the common reasons why we turn down a submission.

• multiple basically identical talks
• topic too recently covered
• topic covered at other similar conferences
• repeated talk
• won’t pull enough people to keep the opposite talks in the available slot from overcrowding the available spaces
• chose a different talk by the same person
• topic not tied tightly enough to the audience’s skills or professional needs
• ensuring space is left for a student or other member of an underrepresented group
• we have many papers on this part of our field, other areas need attention
• out of wall space designated for that general topic
• simple volume … we can’t take them all

Note that this list does not include “your proposal was bad and you should feel bad.”

People are reluctant to re-propose the same talk again. Don’t be? Maybe people filled up the fuzzy bunnies track really early the first year you submitted and yours was simply one of the sacrificial ones because a few of the others fit together especially nicely thematically. The next year, the masses might be on to slithery snakes and there will be a prime space for your etymology of fuzzy bunnies talk, which was always interesting, there was nothing wrong with the bunnies!

People forget that we are generally not gauging quality at all, we’re rating things like “is this clear for this audience?” and “can this talk be a good way to get people to meet during the discussion and be able to continue to chat into lunch?”

There are certainly ways to slamdunk a submission to get it noticed. An abstract where we can imagine the precise audience who will be interested, which makes it obvious the level of experience required, talks clearly about the topics to cover (and sounds reasonable for the timeframe and experience of the presenter) and explains how the audience will be able to use what they’ve learned for their own purposes? That is immediately noticed. One that simply presents a topic without much context requires that both the committee and the audience know exactly what you are on about and can identify the talk’s purpose and end results on their own. If you want to talk about filaments in light bulbs produced between 1982-1995 we NEED to understand what is interesting about that. We believe you, but you only get a paragraph or two, is it there? Showmanship does matter, but this detail is why we can get excited about your topic.

Sometimes it’s just not exciting, it’s informational. Then we need to have someone around who understands its value. Teams tend to have both specialists and generalists doing these reviews. I’m a generalist and will alert on talks providing interesting looks into history, social topics, future planning, etc. Someone else might be the light bulb person. If we don’t actually represent that specialty to judge well? That’s OUR shortcoming, not yours.

This process is a balancing act where a handful of people try to stack a bunch of blocks in such a way that we’ll hit a nice variety of topics and provide an interesting broad cross-section of what’s going on in a particular world without letting the blocks fall because we didn’t provide a sufficiently varied mix of popular and niche, this topic and that, intro and advanced, rote technical and something-new.

Also, we all want to hear these sample talks about bunnies and light bulbs. But not at BSDCan.

Also also, you should know that the people who handle BSDCan’s money have no say in which papers get accepted. BSDCan has never sold talk slots. (I would say “never will,” but a million dollars up front and a generous trust fund for every attendee might change our minds.)

With that: here is the tentative list of talks for the 20^th annual BSDCan! (Subject to change, slippery when wet, use as directed, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.)

Tutorials

Managing OpenBSD Networks with NSH — Tom Smyth

Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset — Peter Hansteen

BGP 101 — Massimiliano Stucchi (AS58280.net)

Run Your Own Email Server — Michael Lucas (BSDCan ConCom)

 

BoF

ZFS BoF — Allan Jude (Klara Inc.)

Implementing Routing Domains on an OpenBSD workstation for use with WireGaurd    — Josh Grosse

Contributing to FreeBSD

Contributing to NetBSD

 

Talks

Supporting Business IT and network needs with OpenBSD and NSH — Tom Smyth

HardenedBSD 2024 State of the Hardened Union: A Decade of Hardened Bits — Shawn Webb (The HardenedBSD Project / The HardenedBSD Foundation)

A Journey Into BSD and Standards: BSD and POSIX — Katie McMillan (Government of Canada)

The FreeBSD and Windows Environments — Michael Dexter (Call For Testing)

NetBSD Subfiles — Elijah Sherwood (Western Washington University)

The State of Email — Michael Lucas (BSDCan ConCom)

Zelta: A Safe and Powerful Approach to ZFS Replication — Daniel Bell (Bell Tower Integration)

Alamosa: A Tiered Disk Block Cache for NetBSD — Kira Ash

20 Years of NYC*BUG, and Can We Handle 20 More? — George Rosamond (NYC*BUG)

Supporting FreeBSD in the Field — Allan Jude (Klara Inc.)

LLDB FreeBSD Kernel Module Improvement — ShengYi Hung (National Taiwan Normal University)

Summa Tetraodontidae: Thomas Aquinas Explores OpenBSD’s Medieval Orderliness — Corey Stephan (University of St. Thomas (Houston, Texas))

Address space reservations: Re-thinking address space management for pointer provenance — Brooks Davis (SRI International)

NetBSD on RISC-V – It Finally Runs NetBSD — Dylan Eskew (Western Washington University)

Running your own network using BGP, OSPF and IS-IS on the BSDs — Massimiliano Stucchi (AS58280.net)

Making NetBSD as a fast(er) booting microvm — Emile Heitor (NetBSD)

The Accidental Release Engineer — Colin Percival (Tarsnap Backup Inc.)

Why fsync() on OpenZFS can’t fail, and what happens when it does — Rob Norris (Klara)

Supporting a development lab with FreeBSD — Chuck Tuffli (FreeBSD)

DJ-BSD: DJing and music production in FreeBSD — Charlie Li

Encouraging and enabling SMEs (small to medium enterprises) to contribute to BSD development — Tom Smyth

A userspace NVMe over Fabrics Implementation — John Baldwin (FreeBSD Project)

Calling the BATMAN: Free Networks on FreeBSD — Aymeric Wibo

Improving Haskell Development Experience on FreeBSD — Daniel Lovasko

How to get started hacking NetBSD — Taylor Campbell (The NetBSD Foundation)

quiz: tiny VMs for kernel development — Rob Norris (Klara)

Contributing to FreeBSD via Github — Warner Losh (Netflix)

Towards a Robust FreeBSD-Based Cloud: Porting OpenStack Components — Chih-Hsin Chang

USB Debug Capability on FreeBSD, Revised — Hiroki Sato (Tokyo Institute of Technology)

Hot cross builds: cross-compilation in pkgsrc — Taylor Campbell (The NetBSD Foundation)

FreeBSD as the backbone of a vaccine/medication refrigerator monitoring system — Phillip Vuchetich (Arxsine Inc.)

FreeBSD at 30 Years: Its Secrets to Success — Marshall Kirk McKusick (McKusick Consultancy)

 

 

Full Disclosure! BSDCan Finances

 

The CFP for the 20^th Annual BSDCan has ended and the program committee is busily reviewing your submissions. I’m not only the organizing team chair, I’m also on that papers committee, and all I’ll say is that we got some good stuff this year.

Thanks to the efforts of Allan Jude and Colin Percival, BSDCan now has a new business organization and a bank account. Sponsor support is starting to come in and prospective sponsors often rightfully ask us how we spend their contributions. While numbers increase every year, here are the rough figures from 2023 (in Canadian dollars, because Canada).

• University of Ottawa facilities (rooms, lunches, hacker lounge): $29,000
• Speaker accommodations: $12,000
• Speaker travel: $16,000
• T-shirts: $4,200
• Tote bags: $1,800
• Closing Social: $11,000

Total: $74,000

One of the things that makes BSD conferences special is that we pay for speaker accommodations and travel. This breakdown shows why we need sponsors. 2024 will cost more than this.

Note that this does NOT include the FreeBSD DevSummit. The FreeBSD Foundation pays those expenses. Some speakers attend the DevSummit as well as the conference, but that doesn’t increase the flight cost so we’re delighted to help out there. Some speakers volunteer to cover their travel costs and we sincerely appreciate it. If your employer will cover your travel and accommodation, we’d be thrilled to list them as a travel sponsor. If you want to host a similar DevSummit or mini event, reach out immediately so we can get you a room. My next post will be too late.

BSDCan registration fees haven’t changed for years and we pride ourselves on keeping costs low. We could pay for the entire conference by raising the admission to $750 or so, but BSDCan’s traditional motto is Bringing BSD Together. We want to welcome younger folks who will become tomorrow’s contributors. Instead, we’ve slightly increased admission for regular attendees. If you work for a large company that has a serious training budget, please sign up as a corporate attendee. We’re being pessimistic and thinking we can raise $30,000 that way. We’re also planning to charge for the closing social, but there’s a possibility that a per-head fee will keep some folks away. Who knows how that will work out?

That leaves $44,000. Our sponsorship goal is $50,000 to give us some leeway for increased costs. We’ve been promised a good chunk of that so far, but only about $8,000 has arrived in our account and some of that money has already gone—reserving rooms means paying deposits.

For BSDCan to succeed, we must make pessimistic assumptions. We might have more attendees. We certainly hope to have more attendees. Any funds raised over the goal will go to replenishing BSDCan’s financial reserves for 2025 and beyond.

If you work for a company that uses BSD, they’re getting a heck of a deal. I’d encourage you to ask your employer to sponsor us. They’ll want to know why. Here are some things you can use to persuade them to support us.

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Why Support BSDCan?

BSDCan’s traditional motto is Bringing BSD Together and we do that in many ways. For twenty years we have brought developers together to discussion technical matters, helped users learn from authoritative presentations and tutorials, and brought people of every level of experience to the hands-down best BSD hallway track in the world. No matter where you’re from or what your level of BSD experience is, you are welcome at BSDCan.

BSD Unix and its projects are about building quality infrastructure. We would not have the Internet as we know it without BSD, nor many of the most popular appliances, phones, and web sites. This reach is possible thanks to our commitment to sharing our work without charge and without restrictions. This permissiveness spurns innovation and has done so for nearly half a century.

 

What is on the BSDCan program?

Users and developers will discuss real-world problems and resolve edge cases to enhance system reliability, performance, and usefulness. Tutorials expand users’ skills while various projects will host their own meetings. Well-known BSD technologies represented at BSDCan include OpenSSH, OpenZFS, Packet Filter, IPFW, OpenPAM, Jails, bhyve, IPFW, DTrace, LibreSSL, and Clang/LLVM among many more.

Who is the target audience?

The target audience includes everyone from potential BSD users up to advanced developers. Tracks include Development, Systems Administration, and real-world Experiences.

Our core constituency includes:

• BSD developers (committers, project leads, contributors, including third party software maintainers)
• BSD users, systems administrators, vendors, and operators
• Companies looking to recruit top-notch talent and individuals looking for opportunities

We are specifically reaching out for two other groups:

• Potential Commercial Users Currently Using Linux: We will reach this audience by including talks by vendors successfully using BSD as a building block. These talks will describe why the selected BSD and how it helps their engineers and company succeed. We will promote these talks on general Unix/Linux online platforms and communities.
• Potential End Users Currently Using Linux: We will reach this audience by including talks by about how Linux shops can migrate OpenZFS to BSD for their storage needs and benefit from the tight integration and improved performance. Ideally this content would provide access to how-to guides to help with this workload migration. We will promote these talks on general Unix/Linux online platforms and communities.

How does your sponsorship help?

BSDCan has always kept its ticket prices low to allow the broadest demographic of community members to attend. We also pride ourselves on funding the travel and accommodations of our presenters to further remove barriers to participation. Your sponsorship goes directly to our venue and travel costs, plus luxuries at your discretion such as the social event.

Visit our Sponsorship page (https://www.bsdcan.org/2024/sponsorship.php) to learn more and we hope to see you there!

Michael W Lucas – for the BSDCan organizers