Meanwhile, in Europe

Meanwhile, in Europe It's been a couple of years since the BSD community first got together at their own conference, at the FreeBSDCon in Berkeley in October 1999, about which I reported in December 1999 Dæmon News.

That was such a success that it was repeated in Monterey CA in October 2000, now as the BSDCon. Again I reported in the December 2000 Dæmon News. So now it's time to report on the BSDCon 2000, right? Well, yes, but there's a little difference: after last year's BSDCon, Kirk McKusick suggested to the board of USENIX to take over running the conference, and USENIX decided that February would be a better time to hold the conference, so the next BSDCon will be from 11 to 14 February 2002.

In the meantime, however, a group of European hackers decided that it was a little expensive to have to go to the USA for this kind of conference, and indeed there were a large number of potential delegates who couldn't afford the two previous conferences. As a result, they organized the first BSDCon Europe in Brighton, England, in mid-November. Like the first FreeBSDCon in Berkeley, this was an experiment to a certain extent. Unlike the first FreeBSDCon, sponsorship levels were much lower, making it a lot riskier.

The conference was a great success. In comparison with the US events, a larger proportion of the attendees came from outside of the country, so there was an element of tourism as well as the traditional activities involved in a conference. The organizers recognized this, and it was part of the reason they chose Brighton, a well-known tourist destination which also happened to closer to some parts of France than it was to London.

We took a large number of photos of the event. A number of the photos remain without adequate titles; if you can help fill them in, contact the people who took the photos.

Apple's BSD involvement

We've known for a while that Apple Computer Inc. has based their new operating system, MacOS X, on BSD. It was released earlier this year, and now that they've shaken out the initial bogons, it's becoming clear that Apple, as the biggest vendor of UNIX-like operating systems in the world, is becoming an important part of the BSD community. Back home in Australia, the AUUG is planning to hold some Apple-specific symposia. In Brighton, Apple was a major sponsor and supplied the machines for the terminal room, all running MacOS X of course. As the photos show, they were very popular. It's certainly interesting to see a ``consumer'' machine which also has the ability to run serious applications. A number of BSD people, notably Jordan Hubbard, use MacOS X for their day-to-day work--see below.

The Con was spread over a long weekend, from Friday to Sunday. On the Friday there were a number of free tutorials. I did a whole day tutorial on kernel debugging, so I didn't get to see any of the other tutorials. Mine was successful, at least for me: I covered the material I had in the time allocated, and was even able to ``accidentally'' panic a machine with exactly the same panic as one on one of my slides. That turned out to be a bug in memory allocation which only affected laptops, and Bodo Rueskamp and Ian Dowse promptly attacked it and fixed it:

iedowse     2001/11/09 15:58:07 PST

  Modified files:
    sys/kern             subr_prf.c 
  Log:
  Properly sanity-check the old msgbuf structure before we accept it
  as being valid. Previously only the magic number and the virtual
  address were checked, but it makes little sense to require that
  the virtual address is the same (the message buffer is located at
  the end of physical memory), and checks on the msg_bufx and msg_bufr
  indices were missing.
  
  Submitted by:	Bodo Rueskamp 
  Tripped over during a kernel debugging tutorial given by: grog
  Reviewed by:	grog, dwmalone
  MFC after:	1 week
  
  Revision  Changes    Path
  1.73      +7 -4      src/sys/kern/subr_prf.c

It's always nice to have real life problems at tutorials.

On Friday evening we had an English ``pub-style'' quiz show, which proved to be lots of fun, and O'Reilly and Associates donated a number of books as prizes. It quickly became evident that my team wasn't going to win, so we decided to go for the booby prize instead, which turned out to be 100 sticks of ``Brighton Rock'', a kind of foam sugar rolled into sticks, with lettering down the inside, in this case FREEBSD SERVICES. The organizers had had to buy 1000 sticks of it, and there was still plenty left over.

The following night was the conference dinner. I may be an old fogey, but I think that the purposes of these dinners is to get together and talk, not to listen to music, especially if it's loud. Unfortunately, the organizers had hired a band which was loud enough to make conversation impossible, so we didn't get very much done.

I didn't go to many of the talks: I've found that most of them are more tuned towards the casual user, which is almost certainly the correct focus, but I personally found it much more interesting to talk to people.

Killing the bugs

At the end of the conference, we had a question and answer session. I didn't have much idea of what that meant, but it ended up handling only two topics: first, a discussion of how to promote BSD, which unfortunately didn't come to much of a conclusion, and then another discussion on how to get rid of the enormous backlog of problem reports which the FreeBSD project has accumulated. That did come to a conclusion: after a long discussion, the representatives of the FreeBSD core team (Jordan Hubbard and myself) agreed to ask the core team to create a ``Bugmeister'', in charge of closing PRs, and a new category of contributor responsible for closing bugs, the ``bugbusters''. Dag-Erling Smørgrav volunteered for the position of Bugmeister. After my own experience of closing bug reports in another life, I wasn't surprised that he was the only one.

Within the week, FreeBSD core had agreed to the position of Bugmeister, which may not sound very remarkable until you understand the speed with which we usually get things done. Dag-Erling is now collecting his bug busters. He can do with plenty of help. If you want to help, send him mail.

Next year

The BSDCon Europe is not a one-off event. Plans are already under way for a conference next year, probably in Holland. If you're interested in helping, contact Guido van Rooij.

Changes in the FreeBSD core team

As I've mentioned above, the FreeBSD core team, elected a year ago to be more efficient than its predecessor, is still not a bolt of lightning. A few days after the BSDCon Europe, some people started complaining that Core was still too secretive and too slow-moving. Once again we ended up with a heated discussion about the pros and cons of running the project. This time, however, something happened. A year ago I wrote:

The core team appeared to be not doing enough. Problems reported to the core team seemed to disappear into a black hole.

The core team appeared to be doing too much, meddling in affairs which didn't concern them.

Some people accused the core team of cronyism, that they were applying two sets of rules, depending on the people involved.

Some people also pointed to individual members of core who hadn't been heard of for a surprisingly long period of time. This ``dead wood'', they said, was a problem.

People didn't complain too much about the second and third issues any more. But the black hole syndrome was still an issue, and though nobody complained about the fourth problem, it was an issue: one of our members had been sick for some time, and since recovering we hadn't heard from him. Even repeated questions to him went unanswered. What to do?

Well, it was pretty clear that we knew what we had to do, but it's painful. Finally, however, we removed him from the core team, as our statutes demand. It's a sad thing to have to do, but it's probably a good thing we did it: it shows that we can live up to our promises. It in no way reflects on the ability of the core team member in question: in a volunteer project like FreeBSD, other commitments are frequently much more important than the project.

Squatters

If you go back to the prior articles I mentioned at the beginning of this article and follow some of the links, you might be surprised by the content of http://www.FreeBSDCon.com and http://www.FreeBSDCon.org. I certainly was: a company called NameRegister.com is squatting on them and wants at least $550 to let them go. I'm sure nobody in the BSD world wants to have anything to do with these criminals, but it's a harsh warning about what can happen when you register a domain and then drop it again.