conference REPORT by Michael Dexter • BSDCan 2014 was an amaz- deployment. Done right, this could be of great ing experience as always, value to embedded FreeBSD efforts. but one theme characterized wo notable highlights of the FreeBSD Doc TSprints were the participation of Ingo this year’s event more than Schwarze of the mandoc project, who committed any other: COORDINATION. FreeBSD's Igor documentation proofing tool to OpenBSD ports, and Allan Jude's formal entrance ever in my dozen years in the community into the FreeBSD project with a documentation have I seen such active dialog among the commit bit. Allan and Kris Moore have done a Nvarious BSD projects. From praise to con- great job raising awareness of FreeBSD and other structive criticism, developers from all the projects BSD projects with the BSDNow podcast and are engaged with one other in sessions and in the demonstrating just how seamless community and priceless BSDCan hallway track. Beginning with a code participation can be. project that is close to my heart, Peter Grehan hough many of us were already exhausted announced at the FreeBSD DevSummit that the from all-day discussions and late-night coding, bhyve hypervisor would soon support NetBSD, T it was finally time for the conference proper to rounding out its support for OpenBSD, NetBSD begin. This saw an infusion of yet more wonder- and virtual machines. I can think of no bet- ful people and continued engagement and cod- ter way for developers to see firsthand how each ing. Security was a key topic with the FreeBSD operating system works and to cross-validate Address-space Layout Randomization (ASLR), code. Kudos to Peter, Neel Natu, John Baldwin Capsicum and LibreSSL talks standing out as and everyone else who has helped bhyve become must-see events. Each talk was highly cross-polli- such a useful feature in FreeBSD. nated by developers from different BSD projects ontinuing in the spirit of coordination, with almost a sense of obligation to the Internet CAbhishek Gupta of Microsoft's Hyper-V group community as a whole, given BSD's key role in was on hand to discuss with developers how to the development of the Internet. guarantee that FreeBSD is a first-class Hyper-V he Embedded track comprised of ARM, guest OS. From the sound of it, Microsoft MIPS64 and NAND flash storage talks and was appears to have more developers focusing on T also very timely given the changing nature of FreeBSD than Intel! Together, bhyve and Hyper-V computing. Warner Losh went into great detail represent compelling OS-native hypervisors, and about how NAND flash storage works and how a rest assured, Windows virtual machine support in broad range of reliability is available from the var- bhyve is under active development. ious flash technologies. This track even extended att Ahrens of the OpenZFS project gave his to a lunch time MIPS router hacking BOF lead by Mannual update on new ZFS features that are Sean Bruno. It is great that we have real Unix on making their way into FreeBSD in order to keep really affordable hardware. FreeBSD a first-class ZFS platform. Of these fea- he closing auction was fun as always and the tures, ZFS "bookmarks" will enable ZFS replica- clouds broke on Sunday, allowing quite a few tion without relying on snapshots as a unit of T attendees to walk around Ottawa and Parliament history. Just how quickly the OpenZFS project before heading home. Some brave systems transitioned from post-Sun Microsystems confu- administrators opted to take the first BSD sion to solid, OS-agnostic contributions is remark- Certification Group BSD Professional exam and able. We all owe Matt, who has just received his the feedback I heard was very positive. The BSD FreeBSD commit bit our gratitude for his active Professional exam is a hands-on exam designed participation in the BSD community at events like to complement the BSD Associate exam that the BSDCan and AsiaBSDCon. BSDCG has offered for several years. This is an ther DevSummit highlights included a clarifi- exciting development and is testament to the Ocation of FreeBSD's "long-term support" pol- continued growth of the BSD community. • icy with the comforting recognition that the proj- ect had in fact been more or less adhering to the proposed 5-year policy. A formal affirmation of Michael has used BSD Unix systems since 1991 such a policy is a valuable marketing tool for and has participated in the jail, sysjail, mult, Xen everyone from vendors to end users. A sugges- and most recently bhyve virtualization projects. tion was raised for separating the FreeBSD base He is an independent BSD author and support into packages to allow for modular updating and provider. 38 FreeBSD Journal