• Devsummit
• 201902

FreeBSD mini-Developer Summit, February 2019

Brussels, Belgium. February 1st, 2019.

This invitation-only FreeBSD Developer Summit takes place the day before FOSDEM 2019, located in Brussels, Belgium. FreeBSD committers are welcome to register themselves; non-committers have to be sponsored by a committer to attend.

FOSDEM 2019

FOSDEM 2019 takes place on February 2nd and 3rd, 2019. Note that the FreeBSD mini-developer summit is organized independently from FOSDEM. The FreeBSD Foundation has agreed to sponsor parts of this mini-devsummit. Consider making a donation to help support events like this.

Travel Information

The FOSDEM Practical page has a lot of information about how to get to Brussels for FOSDEM.

Approaching the Event site

The DevSummit will be held in central Brussels.

The DevSummit will take place in the NH Carrefour de L'Europe hotel. Enter the hotel lobby and take the stairs next to the elevator down to level -3. Signs will show you which room the FreeBSD Developer Summit will be held in. The address is Rue du Marché aux Herbes 110, B-1000 Brussels. This is on the Place d'Espagne, just between the Grand'Place and the Central Station.

From the Central Station:

• exit and walk north towards Boulevard de l'Impératrice / Keizerinlaan.
• After 30 meters, turn left on to Boulevard de l'Impératrice / Keizerinlaan.
• Walk straight on and then turn right towards Rue du Marché aux Herbes / Grasmarkt.
• Take the stairs, and then turn right.
• The hotel is on the right.

The hotel website has more instructions.

IRC

Note that many of attendees of the summit hang out on #devsummit on EFnet during the event (as well as the conference itself). Feel free to join!

Schedule

The current general plan is as follows.

(Do not edit this section yourself unless asked to.)

Presentations

Tell us about your latest project, brainstorm on solutions to a hard problem, train us to use a new tool, make observations about a FreeBSD development process and how to improve it, tell us how your company uses FreeBSD, or coordinate activities! But, please do not duplicate a talk that you are giving at EuroBSDcon.

Submit your proposals to devsummit@freebsd.org and include a small abstract and number of slots needed. (1 slot = 20 minutes)

(Submission is closed, accepted proposals are added continuously.)

(Do not edit this section yourself unless asked to.)

Notes

If you are in trouble with preparing your slides, you could use the template attached to the page. It contains a LaTeX source file that you can modify to create PDF slides for the FreeBSD Developer Summit. It uses the Beamer class which is an easy-to-use extension to LaTeX for making presentations. You can easily install it by the following command (as root):

# pkg install latex-beamer

This will install Beamer and pdfLaTeX that can be used for compiling the sources to produce the desired PDF file.

$ pdflatex my-presentation.latex

Or you can use the LibreOffice / OpenOffice template (contributed by BaptisteDaroussin).

A few rule-of-thumbs when creating slides:

• Try to make things legible, use large fonts.
• Have title and closing.
• Use less text, you do not have to include everything on the slides. (Prepare and) Do a demonstration if needed.
• You have only a limited amount of time, having only 1 slide per minute (in addition to title and closing) is usually fine.
• Sometimes images can tell more than pure text.
• Discussions and meetings are the place where you might want to talk about the details.

Contact devsummit@FreeBSD.org if you have questions or problems.

Registration

In order to attend, you must register in advance using our registration system; this allows us to size rooms, order food, provide beverages, and make dinner reservations. We appreciate your cooperation in letting us know your plans well in advance of the event. Non-committers must be sponsored by a committer in order to attend.

The meeting room and refreshments during the DevSummit will be sponsored. We collect a small fee rom attendees to help cover the costs. The dinner will have to be paid by the attendees themselves (at the dinner).

Here is a list of the attendees and their guests at the summit.

Developer Attendees

Registration is closed (we're full, thanks for registering).

(Please keep sorted alphabetically by last name. Do not change the format unless asked to.)

Guest Attendees

Developers are welcome to invite guests to attend the developer summit, subject to their tolerance for ceaseless hours of kernel hacking, and availability of space at the venue.

(Please keep sorted alphabetically by last name. Do not change the format unless asked to.)

Further Useful Information

Catering

Lunch will consist of soup and sandwiches.

Meal Requirements

Dinner

There will be an organized dinner on Friday evening at a restaurant (details coming soon) beginning at 19:30. Attendees have to pay individually for their food and drinks. The menu will consist of a choice of main course (with a vegetarian option) and dessert, with an optional starter.

Maps

Restaurant

Racines, Ixelles

DiscussionNotes

FreeBSD Mini-Devsummit before FOSDEM 2019

URL for this pad: https://hackmd.io/YS-PwyjbRxS-PqS5xK1Y6g
Linked from: [[Devsummit/201902|Dev Summit 201902]].

Intros

Last minute additions to the agenda

rodrigo asks around if anyone is using his pkg-provides plugin and if there are any issues

manu@ presenting about the pinebook, graphics on arm64, pinephone, pinetab (no video support at all yet, no framebuffer)(https://www.pine64.org)

GSoC

Mahdi briefly presents his GSoC 2019 idea: Linux netlink drivers, more GSoC admins needed, add ideas ([[SummerOfCode|Summer of Code]]), gsoc mentors IRC channel: #gsoc-mentors, GSoC-FAQ
Going through the idea list to see what’s still needed
Review of existing list
Kernel sanitizers probably already in progress.
Check if bhyve is still needed
Check with imp@ on PNP_INFO items
IPv6 userland cleanup project needs more definition; “cleanup work” may not be a great project. However, if it can be re-phrased as a “new feature” project, that may fit better.
Rewrite “Audit base for read-only and NFS Mount Compatibility”: read-only works and is regularly tested by enough users; does NFS testing level need to be re-evaluated after recent PNFS re-write?
Add Li-wen to MFSBSD release-building project?
Fill in ports section with items from the ports wish-list?
Add kp@ as mentor to Network Configuration Libraries project
New ideas
Netlink API (Freifunk?)
Possibly add kernel code coverage, if manageable for SoC project
Electron?
$850 bounty: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/29075473-add-freebsd-support-to-electron
pf/ipfw tests
Config/control libraries: libifconfig, libnetstat, libipfw, etc.
Followed by Python, etc. bindings?
Needs to be broken into smaller chunks; for example, add specific features to libifconfig
Convert existing shell tools to use the libraries
Example project: Add <fill in the blank> features to libifconfig and convert ifconfig to use the libifconfig implementation
Let students propose additional projects
FreeBSD Timeline

Collect more points for the timeline
Running and testing -CURRENT ensures the problems are identified while the work is still fresh in everyones head.

Oxybiodegradable pens are a thing

Bug Busting discussion:

Release cycles too long to get user exposure for features and after a release, there seems to be spike in bug reports from users. Shorter cycles would give quicker feedback.

Have actionable bug reports not just “it’s broken”

Script to collect information (anonymizing it) about a system, whose output must be attached to any kind of bug report -> kp@, gonzo@

Size swap partition according to available RAM for (compressed) kernel crash dumps or default to 8 GB; fallback to textdumps instead of panicing if there is not enough space to dump, aggregate the backtraces somewhere (ask backtrace.io folks if they can do it for us?)

Telemetry

Make problems more actionable, easier to pick up problems with spare time

Distinguish between actual bugs and feature requests -> filter those by labels in bugzilla

Schema change for the bugzill a tables for mandatory tables for supported release, automatically close the PRs that don’t match those releases anymore (with a message to submitter to re-submit if it’s still valid); be careful with auto-closing automation, should automatically go to “needs reproduction” queue - transits to “closed” or “responded” state after a timeout (something like 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, etc. without a response)

Office hours for bugs in a specific state or category

Patches should go into Phabricator (better integration between the tools), automatically open a review with reference to the bug ID

Bugathons, bugbusting sessions (2h) at devsummits in small groups to look at bugs and decide what to do with them

BSoC to create extensions for FreeBSD’s bugzilla

Bugzilla christmas crackers containing a bug ID, bingo cards, have hacktoberfest-like contests

Rodrigo talking about the ports conflicts scanner (http://pkg-provides.osorio.me/conflicts/), feasibility of integrating it with portlint is discussed, part of poudriere?

manu@ is interested in automated FreeBSD installs by reading a config file

Photos

(Mail devsummit@freebsd.org with the link to your photos so we can add them here.)

Information on Prior Developer Summits

Information on prior Developer Summits is available from the Dev Summit page.