Conference - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)

FOSDEM navigation 101

FOSDEM 2020 is over. As I type this, I’m on my way back home from the conference in Brussels. And it has been nice. In the end. I must confess I was frustrated by the middle of the first day, though things got better after that.

Here is the thing: FOSDEM is not your usual conference. There are lots of things going on at once and all of them are crowded. Really, really crowded—to the point where the situation doesn’t make any sense unless you know how to work around it.

February 3, 2020 · Tags: conference, sandboxfs
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BSDCan 2014 summary

BSDCan 2014 and the accompanying FreeBSD devsummit are officially over. Let's recap.

FreeBSD devsummit

The FreeBSD devsumit at BSDCan is, by far, the largest of them all. It is true that I already visited a devsummit once —the one in EuroBSDCon 2013—, but this is the first time I participate in the "real deal" while also being a committer.

The first impressive thing about this devsummit is that there were about 120 attendees. The vast majority of these were developers, of course, but there was also a reasonable presence from vendors — including, for example, delegates from Netflix, Isilon, NetApp and even smaller parties like Tarsnap.

May 21, 2014 · Tags: bsdcan, conference, freebsd, netbsd, testing
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FreeBSD Test Suite tutorial at AsiaBSDCon 2014

I am pleased to announce that the tutorial on the FreeBSD Test Suite that I proposed for AsiaBSDCon 2014 has been accepted!

The conference website will soon include more details, but allow me to spoil your wait:

Goals: Learn how to use the test suite, how it is internally organized and how new tests can be written.
Stretch goal: Get attendees to contribute one or more tests to the project.
Audience: Mostly developers of FreeBSD that want to learn how the new test suite plugs into the system. That said, and because a major part of the tutorial will revolve around using the test suite for one's own benefit, everyone is welcome really. In particular, system administrators may get a useful tool out of this.

The main surprise in the acceptance confirmation email is that materials are due by January 20th... which is around the corner! Time to rush in getting things ready. In the meantime, you can find more details on the tutorial by reading the proposal itself.

January 8, 2014 · Tags: conference, freebsd, kyua, testing
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Live from EuroBSDCon 2013, day 4

Live from Malta today attending the EuroBSDCon 2013 conference. The conference is over; today was the second and last day and it has just finished.

Hardware and virtualization

One of the three tracks today included a lot of talks on hardware, porting of BSDs to new hardware and virtualization techniques. Of all these, the few talks I attended covered the topics in great detail and proved to be very interesting.

September 29, 2013 · Tags: conference, eurobsdcon, kyua, virtualization
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Live from EuroBSDCon 2013, day 3

Live from Malta today attending the EuroBSDCon 2013 conference. Today is the first day of the conference itself. Many more people have shown up as expected and there have been tons of very interesting talks all the time. It is both good and bad that there are several tracks: you can select the topic you are most interested in, but sometimes great talks overlap!

Keynote

Today's opening session was led by Theo de Raadt, the founder of OpenBSD. His keynote focused on explaining how there is no real research happening on operating systems any more and how new, risky technological changes can be tested in a real-world system like OpenBSD.

September 28, 2013 · Tags: conference, eurobsdcon, kyua, netbsd
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Live from EuroBSDCon 2013, day 2

Live from Malta today attending the EuroBSDCon 2013 conference. Today is the second day of tutorials, still overlapped by the second day of the FreeBSD devsummit and the only day of the NetBSD devsummit.

OpenBSD

Hallway conversations are powerful and, in my opinion, the best aspect of these conferences.

I had the chance today to talk to Peter Hessler from OpenBSD. Only 15 to 20 minutes of discussion were necessary to learn a lot about how the OpenBSD project is run and to clear some of the misconceptions I had, which I don't know where I got from. One obvious example is that OpenBSD does support SMP and has in fact been doing so for a long time — except, of course, for the fact that the giant kernel lock is still being removed.

September 27, 2013 · Tags: conference, eurobsdcon, freebsd, openbsd, pcbsd
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Live from EuroBSDCon 2013, day 1

Hello everyone! Live from Malta today attending the EuroBSDCon 2013 conference.

Today is the first day out of four: two days of tutorials and two days of actual conference. The tutorials are overlapped by two days of the usual FreeBSD Developer Summit (devsummit for short) and one day of the infrequent NetBSD Developer Summit.

The ambient here is pretty good already: lots of enthusiastic people catching up since the last time they met each other and, more importantly, discussing ongoing developments. Keeping in mind that this is only the first day of tutorials and not the proper conference, things look promising: many more people are expected to join on Saturday.

September 26, 2013 · Tags: conference, eurobsdcon, freebsd, netbsd
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Kyua: Weekly status report, BSDCan 2011 edition

I spent past week in Ottawa, Canada, attending the BSDCan 2011 conference. The conference was composed of lots of interesting content and hosted many influential and insightful BSD developers. While the NetBSD presence was very reduced, I could have some valuable talks with both NetBSD and FreeBSD developers.

Anyway. As part of BSDCan 2011, I gave a talk titled "Automated testing in NetBSD: past, present and future". The talk focused on explaining what led to the development of ATF in the context of NetBSD, what related technologies exist in NetBSD (rump, anita and dashboards), what ATF's shortcomings are and how Kyua plans to resolve them. (Video coming soon, I hope.)

The talk was later followed by several questions and off-session conversations about testing in general in BSDs. Among these, I gathered a few random ideas / feelings:

The POSIX 1003.3 standard defines the particular results a test can emit (see the corresponding DejaGnu documentation). Both ATF and Kyua already implement all the results defined in the standard, but they use different names and extend the standard with many extra results. Given that the standard does not define useful concepts like "expected failures", an idea that came up is to provide a flag to force POSIX compliance at the cost of being less useful. Why? Just for the sake of saying that Kyua conforms to this standard.
The audience seemed to like the idea of a "tests results store" quite a bit, and the sound of SQLite for the implementation was not bullied. This is something I'm eager to work on, but not before I publish a 0.1 release.
I highlighted the possibility of allowing Kyua to run "foreign" test programs so that we could integrate the results into the database. This could be useful to run tests for which we (*BSD) have no control (e.g. gcc) in an integrated manner. The idea was not bullied by anyone either.
FreeBSD has already been looking at ATF / Kyua and they are open to collaboration.
OpenBSD won't import any new C++ code, and adding C-based tests to the tree while relegating the C++ runtime to the ports is not an option. Somehow I expected this.
Junos (the FreeBSD-based operating system from Jupiter Networks) recently imported ATF and they are happy with it so far. Yay!
Would be nice to have a feature to run tests remotely after, maybe, deploying a single particular test and its dependencies. This is gonna be tricky and not in my current immediate plans.

Other than that, I had little time to do some coding:

Fixed a problem in which both ATF and Kyua were not correctly resetting the timezone of the executed tests. I only found this because, after arriving in Canada, some Kyua tests would start to fail. (Yes, the fix is in both code bases!)
Added some support to capture deadly signals that terminate Kyua so that Kyua can print an informational message stating that something went wrong and which log file contains more information. See r121.

That's it folks! Thanks to those attending the conference and, in particular, to those that came to my talk :-)

May 16, 2011 · Tags: atf, conference, kyua, report
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NetBSD talk at Isla Cristina

Yesterday night, I got back from the "I Jornadas Tecnológicas Isla Cristina", a small technological conference organized at Isla Cristina, a little town in Huelva, Spain.

The main organizers were the teachers of a local technical school (the IES Padre José Miravent), and they invited me to give a talk about NetBSD development. I will publish the slides soon, but I have to warn you that you will not like the source format, aka PowerPoint. Being part of the university personnel, I was given a copy of Office 2008 for Mac and I wanted to give it a serious try before judging it. It is certainly more powerful (or easy to use) than OpenOffice Impress, but it is also a lot slower; I don't know what they have done there, but the application feels really really sluggish.

Anyway, back to the point of the conference. It has been great and surpassed all the expectations I had. The organization was excellent, the people was very nice, the food was (very) abundant and the talks were interesting (except for a couple of exceptions). What else could you ask for?

Just as a point of fact, there were around 300 registered people, and I guess around 100 of them came to my talk (it was first hour in the morning); that's a lot more public than I have ever had before, and it was a really exciting thing. I hope the listeners enjoyed it as much as I did.

The only thing I regret was not staying there one more day (after the conference) so I could go around the town and take some cool photos. Maybe next year :-) Ah, speaking of next year: if you get invited to give a talk, don't think twice and accept the offer!

April 5, 2008 · Tags: conference, netbsd
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