Day 1 (March 17, 2011) - Tutorials and Small Meetings I CANCELED

Day 2 (March 18, 2011) - Tutorials and Small Meetings II CANCELED

Day 3 (March 19, 2011) - Paper Session I

Day 4 (March 20, 2011) - Paper Session II

Keynote

K1: Keynote: Inside the TSUBAME2.0 Supercomputer

Abstract:

TSUBAME2.0 is a production supercomputer operated at Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC), Tokyo Institute of Technology. Since Fall 2010, it has been one of the fastest and greenest supercomputers in the world, boasting 2.4 PFlops peak performance by aggressive GPU acceleration, which allows scientists to enjoy significantly faster, larger computing than ever. The computing nodes, which run either Linux or Windows, are provided to the user as batch-based as well as interactive-based services. Its storage system is also highly advanced, consisting of hundreds TB of ultra-fast SSD and seven PB of parallel file systems. All the resources are interconnected by QDR Infiniband network that form a fat tree with full bisection bandwidth. This talk presents an overview of the machine with particular focus on its system software architecture.

Speaker:

Naoya Maruyama received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2008, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC) of Tokyo Institute of Technology. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing in large-scale high-performance computing systems, such as supercomputers and grid and cloud environments.

Tutorials

T1A+T2A: Building the network you need with PF, the OpenBSD packet filter

Abstract:

Building the network you need is the central theme for any network admin. This tutorial is for aspiring or seasoned network professionals with at least a basic knowledge of networking in general and TCP/IP particular. The session aims at teaching tools and techniques to make sure you build your network to work the way it's supposed to, keeping you in charge. Central to the toolbox is the OpenBSD PF packet filter, supplemented with tools that interact with it. Whether you are a greybeard looking for ways to optimize your setups or a greenhorn just starting out, this session will give you valuable insight into the inner life of your network and provide pointers to how to use that knowledge to build the network you need.

The session will provide updates on the new PF syntax and features introduced in OpenBSD 4.7, with updates on new developments in the upcoming OpenBSD 4.9 release.

Slides matching the EuroBSDCon 2010 version of the tutorial can be found at http://home.nuug.no/~peter/pf/eurobsdcon2010/; an updated version will be available at http://home.nuug.no/~peter/pf/asiabsdcon2011/ on the day of the tutorial session.

Instructor:

Peter N. M. Hansteen is a consultant, writer and sysadmin based in Bergen, Norway. He has been tinkering with computers since the mid 1980s and rediscovered Unixes about the time 386BSD appeared. After a few years on Linux, which included participation in the RFC1149 implementation (2001), he eventually migrated all important systems in his care to OpenBSD and FreeBSD. A long time freenix advocate, he is a member of the BLUG (Bergen (BSD and) Linux User Group) core group and a former vice president of NUUG (the Norwegian Unix User Group). During recent years a frequent lecturer and tutor with emphasis on OpenBSD and FreeBSD topics, author of several articles and The Book of PF (No Starch Press 2007, 2nd edition November 2010) and writes an occasionally slashdotted blog at http://bsdly.blogspot.com.

T1B: FreeBSD and NetBSD on Small x86 Based Systems

Abstract:

The tutorial is intended for FreeBSD and/or NetBSD users who wish to learn how to install and run FreeBSD or NetBSD on compact flash x86 based systems like Soekris and PC-Engines. Experience with building the distribution from source of at least one of the two flavors is recommended for this tutorial.

Throughout the tutorial FreeBSD and NetBSD are discussed in parallel and on an equal footing. By pointing out similarities and contrasting differences, a clearer understanding of the fundamental technology required for running Unix on small systems is acquired. Participants who are familiar with one flavor and would like a taste of the other are especially welcome!

Some small systems based on FreeBSD 8.x and NetBSD 5.x will be used to demonstrate various components and features so that participants can see working systems first-hand, observe what such custom-built appliances can accomplish, and learn what hurdles might be encountered.

Instructor:

Adrian Steinmann earned a Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and has over 20 years experience as an IT consultant and software developer. He is founder of Webgroup Consulting AG, a Swiss consulting company.

He has been working with FreeBSD since 1993 and NetBSD since 2005. He develops and maintains the STYX system to offer FreeBSD remote managed firewall services and to build custom systems on small x86 based platforms. This enabling technology has also been used to build secure encryption appliances on commodity hardware for the Swiss IT industry.

He is fluent in Perl, C, English, German, Italian, and has passion and flair for finding straightforward solutions to intricate problems.

During his free time he likes to play Go, to hike, and to sculpt.

T3A: FreeBSD Administration Basics (in Japanese)

Abstract:

In this tutorial the instructor describes basic knowledge of FreeBSD system administration, especially for network server management. The topics covered are installation and updating the FreeBSD base system, installing third-party software, configuration examples of various network services (web, email, NTP, DNS, DHCP, NIS, NFS, etc.), remote machine monitoring, storage management, and other daily work needed for system administration. Although the 8.2-RELEASE on i386 and amd64 are the primary target, the instructor will give some explanations about other architectures, too.

The students will learn what a sysadmin should do in general and administration howtos specific to FreeBSD.

Instructor:

Hiroki Sato is an assistant professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He joined FreeBSD Project as a committer since 2000, and has been working as a member of Documentation Engineering Team, Release Engineering Team, and FreeBSD Core Team, and also working as a director at FreeBSD Foundation. He also joined NetBSD Foundation in 2003. His primary research areas are integrated circuit design, signal processing, and computer architecture.

T4A: IPv6 Tutorial

Abstract:

We all know that IPv4 is running out faster than we could ever predict, and everybody considering himself an'IT guy' should already be knowledgeable about IPv6, a protocol that has been available and usable for more than ten years but never got the right level of audience. Being ahead of the majority of the people will give those who were smart enough a lead over those that underestimated the 'threat'. This tutorial is intended for people wanting to get a greater grasp on the technology and implications of running IPv6, and will be presented a series of exercises to get running in this somewhat new world. There will be an introduction sheding light on key concepts and features, preparing the attendees for the rest of the session, focusing on putting hands on an IPv6-only network.

Topics of the tutorial include IPv6 subnetting, protocol implementation for different common i ternet services like www, mail, dns, along with digressions over routing protocols and implementations. Focus will be on a bands-on approach, where the attendee is requested to act and work on configuring services over a real network.

At the end if the session, attendees should be able to set up an IPv6-enabled network with no hassle, and with the required know-how to migrate services to the new protocol.

Instructors:

Massimiliano Stucchi is CTO of BrianTel, an Italian ISP and WISP. Holding his position, he manages a broad range of systems and technologies with his fellow NOC'ers, such as a geographical wireless network ranging throughout northern Italy, PoPs in a few datacenters and a wired access network spanning the whole country. He is also responsible for running the route servers for MINAP, an internet exchange, and helps running the Italian FreeBSD Users Group (GUFI). In his other life, he's an official referee for the Italian Soccer Federation and a hardcore fan of a few players on the WTA Tour.

Philip Paeps is a software consultant and contractor based in Belgium. He focuses mainly on embedded and real-time systems. For the last few years, he has been spending a lot of energy on the network stack of a very widely deployed residential internet gateway device.

In his so-called free time, Philip is a FreeBSD committer contributing mainly to the kernel, a member of the FreeBSD security team and the FreeBSD core team secretary. He has been using FreeBSD for longer than he can remember.

T4B: Introduction to NETGRAPH on FreeBSD Systems

Abstract:

FreeBSDs NETGRAPH infrastructure can be understood as customizable network plumbing. Its flexibility and the fact that this infrastructure runs in the kernel makes it an attractive enabling technology where time-to-market, agility, and performance are important.

The goal of the tutorial is to become familiar with FreeBSDs NETGRAPH framework and the available NETGRAPH kernel modules. The participants will gain insight and understanding for which projects lend themselves well to NETGRAPH solutions. A number of examples are shown which can be used as a starting point for new NETGRAPH projects. In the first part of the tutorial, the NETGRAPH nodes, hooks, and control messages are described and the command syntax is explained via demonstrations on simple examples. Participants learn how they can describe a network connection in terms of its underlying protocols and how to express a solution using NETGRAPH terminology.

The second part of the tutorial investigates frequently used NETGRAPH nodes and shows how they interconnect to create network protocols. More complex NETGRAPH examples including VLAN bridges, UDP tunnels, and the Multi-link Point-to-Point daemon are described. Guidelines and resources for developing custom NETGRAPH modules are surveyed.

Instructor:

Adrian Steinmann earned a Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and has over 20 years experience as an IT consultant and software developer. He is founder of Webgroup Consulting AG, a Swiss consulting company.

He has been working with FreeBSD since 1993 and NetBSD since 2005. He develops and maintains the STYX system to offer FreeBSD remote managed firewall services and to build custom systems on small x86 based platforms. This enabling technology has also been used to build secure encryption appliances on commodity hardware for the Swiss IT industry.

He is fluent in Perl, C, English, German, Italian, and has passion and flair for finding straightforward solutions to intricate problems.

During his free time he likes to play Go, to hike, and to sculpt.

T5A: FreeBSDを使った日本語環境の構築およびCompizベースのワークステーション構築およびシステム管理方法 (in Japanese)

Abstract:

Unix系のアプリケーションやツールが活用できるワークステーションを使いた いという場合、商用プロダクトとしてはMac OS Xが、無償プロダクトとしては Ubuntuが優れた候補となる。これら環境は日本語環境が最初から整備されており、システムのアップグレードも、アプリケーションのインストールおよびアップグレードも簡単に実施できる。

逆に、こうした既存のプロダクトとは違う環境を利用したいという場合には、これら既存の環境は扱いにくい面が強い。最初から不要なアプリケーションやツールがインストールされており、停止させることができないデーモンが動作している。本来使用が想定されているのとは別のカスタマイズを実施した場合には、システムの動作が予期しないものになる可能性がある。カスタマイズのベースとして扱うのにはあまり向いていない。

本チュートリアルでは、FreeBSDをベースに日本語環境を扱うことができるワークステーション(PC作業環境)を構築する方法を紹介する。GNOMEやKDE、XFce4などの統合環境を利用せず、Compizをベースに必要最小限となるアプリケーションやフォントのインストール、および快適な日本語環境を構築するための設定を説明する。

また、構築したワークステーションのベースとなっているFreeBSDおよびアプリケーションを最新の状態に保持し続ける方法も紹介する。特定の用途に最適化された環境は、必要な機能だけを組み合わせて不要なものがインストールされていない。見通しのいいシステムはアップデートも筋良く実施できる。

Instructor:

後藤大地。FreeBSDコミッタ、オングス代表取締役社長。マイコミジャーナルにおける記事執筆、技術評論社Gihyo.jpにおける記事執筆、書籍執筆、各種ITシステム開発ほか、さまざまな業務に従事。

Meetings

B1D, B4D: *BSD Developer Summit (invited only)

Chair:

TBA

BSD Associate Examination

Abstract:

The BSDA certification is an entry-level certification on BSD Unix systems administration. For more details, please visit:

http://www.bsdcertification.org/certification/associate.html

NOTE: For this exam you need pre-registration via the above URL.

Papers

P1A: Flash and NAND Subsystem for NetBSD

Abstract:

Mobile devices are getting more widespread as the technology gets cheaper and cheaper. If NetBSD wants to stay in line with this trend, it needs to support the most common storage technology in these devices, and that is currently flash.

Existing drivers and file systems cannot be used with Flash memory. Thus, if NetBSD wants to compete with Linux, WinCE and other operating systems used in embedded devices, specific support must be implemented.

An effort of developing a Flash specific file system for NetBSD has been started at the University of Szeged, Hungary in 2010. This project urged the design and implementation of a Flash layer for NetBSD, which could be used as a foundation for the file system.

Author:

Adam Hoka joined the NetBSD Foundation in 2008. His first notable contribution, besides porting applications to NetBSD and occasional bug fixing, is the design and implementation of the Flash and NAND subsystem for NetBSD, which was funded by the University of Szeged, Hungary. He has strong interest in embedded systems and systems programming, but also in other areas like computer vision and multimedia. He is currently studying mechatronical engineering at Szent Istvan Egyetem in Hungary.

When not in front of computers, he enjoys cooking and collecting old hardware and computer literature.

P1B: OpenSSH - what's new?

Abstract:

OpenSSH has been in development in 1998 and for much of this time has been the most popular SSH implementation in use. Despite its age, development on OpenSSH continues and we make a number of feature releases per year. This presentation will examine features that have been added recently, including a new certificate format, support for elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and discuss future directions for OpenSSH.

Author:

Damien Miller is a software engineer from Melbourne, Australia who has worked on OpenSSH, OpenBSD and other free software projects for over ten years. He is currently employed at Google as an Information Security Engineer.

P2A: Improving System Management With ZFS

Abstract:

The Zetabyte File System (ZFS) is a modern file system which combines traditional file system features like a POSIX file system interface with RAID and volume management functionality. Features such as snapshot management and file share management are all managed within the ZFS interface. This management interface provides a number of opportunities to simplify system management. In the Technical Computing Services Sub-division of The Aerospace Corporation we are taking advantage these features in a number of different ways. This paper presents some of the more interesting ones.

Author:

Brooks Davis is a Senior Engineering Specialist in the Technical Computing Services subdivision of The Aerospace Corporation. He has been a FreeBSD user since 1994, a FreeBSD committer since 2001, and a core team member since 2006. He also contributes to the Ganglia and Sun Grid Engine projects. He earned a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College in 1998. His computing interests include high performance computing, networking, security, mobility, and, of course, finding ways to use FreeBSD in all these areas. When not computing, he enjoys reading, cooking, brewing, introducing people to the pleasures of Slow Food, and pounding on red-hot iron in his garage blacksmith shop.

P2B: ASR: an asynchronous resolver implementation

Abstract:

Basically every network program needs to be able to convert host names into network addresses. This operation is performed by the system resolver. The classic resolver interface, as found in the standard C library, is blocking, which makes it impractical in cases where the program wants to keep running while a resolution process is performed. This paper describes a simple API and implementation of an asynchronous resolver framework for use in any program, especially network daemons. It works as a state machine that never issue any blocking call, but instead handle file descriptors to the caller when needed. The current implementation has been successfully integrated in the OpenSMTPD daemon.

Author:

Eric Faurot is OpenBSD enthusisat. He has been using it as my daily OS almost exclusively for about 10 years, contributing as he could, and he became an OpenBSD developer about 3 years ago. He has a Ph.D in computer science, and he is working in a small company where he is in charge of research and development.

P4A: PBI Package Management - Re-implemented for FreeBSD and PC-BSD

Abstract:

The PBI format (Push Button Installer) has been the default package management system for PC-BSD going on 5+ years now. However as we looked to the future it became apparent that it was greatly needing an overhaul to both improve its functionality, and expand its usage outside the scope of just PC-BSD. Among the areas needing improvement were how it dealt with identical libraries between applications, the heavy requirements from being implemented in QT/KDE, and lack of a digital verification mechanism.

From these new requirements the pbi-manager was born as a subset of command-line functionality for dealing with every aspect of PBIs, from building, installing, distribution and advanced management. Features such as digital signature verification, intelligent library sharing, repository management, bsdiff updating and others have already been implemented, along with improved QT4-based front-ends, which behave and look almost identical to the legacy format. The end result is a powerful package format which can be used for traditional FreeBSD users as well as PC-BSD running any window manager, or none for that matter.

Author:

Kris Moore is the founder and lead developer of PC-BSD, a desktop version of FreeBSD, which provides an easy way for users to get and run FreeBSD on the desktop. Kris works for iXsystems which is the corporate sponsor of PC-BSD and the all-around FreeBSD company that builds FreeBSD-certified servers and storage solutions. He lives in the greater Knoxville Tennessee area (USA), and enjoys building custom PCs, tinkering and gaming in his spare time.

P4B: OpenBSD/sun4v: Porting OpenBSD to Sun's UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors

Abstract:

Sun's UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors form a radical change to earlier 64-bit SPARC processors from Sun and Fujitsu. It has many cores, many threads per core and offers a unique approach to virtualization. This virtualization approach has characteristics that make it more attractive from a security standpoint than what's available on other hardware architectures. Therefore it is a very interesting architecture to run OpenBSD on. In this presentation I will discuss how this was achieved.

I'll discuss some of the architectural changes introduced with the UltraSPARC T1 processor and their implications for the OpenBSD kernel. I'll continue with a description of the virtualization approach chosen by Sun for the CoolThreads machines based on the UltraSPARC T1 and T2. Virtual network interfaces and virtual disks have been implemented in OpenBSD 4.5 following the protocols defined by Sun. These make it possible to run OpenBSD in a guest domain or control domain alongside with Solaris, opening up the possibility for some interesting setups. I'll discuss the security implications for OpenBSD running in such a setups. Finally I'll discuss some future improvements that are in the pipeline that will affect the manageability of OpenBSD running on Sun (now Oracle) CoolThreads servers.

Author:

Mark Kettenis did his undergraduate in technical physics at the University of Twenete in Enschede, The Netherlands, and has a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Amsterdam. After spending a couple of years in the IT industry, building high available UNIX systems and teaching customers about them, he joined the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) in 2004 as a software engineer. At JIVE he is involved with several projects related to data processing of long baseline raio astronomy observations in Europe and Beyond. These projects all invlve high speed networking and high performance computing in one way or another.

Mark contributed to various Open Source software projects such as the GNU C Library, The Hurd, FreeBSD and GDB, the GNU Project Debugger. It was GDB that got him involved with OpenBSD when trying to make GDB useful on OpenBSD/sparc with the StackGhost security feature enabled. He was recruited to improve GDB on all the hardware architectures that OpenBSD runs on, but soon became a hardcore OpenBSD kernel hacker. His interest is mostly on the hardware side of things, and he is the maintainer of the OpenBSD/sparc64 and OpenBSD/hppa ports.

P5A: Fossilizing NetBSD: The road to modern version control

Abstract:

The NetBSD project has successfully used CVS for over one and a half decades. The main modules, pkgsrc and src, provide a huge challenge for any replacement, both in terms of raw size and the number of individual commits. This talk discusses a possible migration from CVS to Fossil.

Fossil is a modern version control system (VCS). It has atomic commits, fast branching and supports distributed operation. The liberal license and the lack of external dependencies make it a rather attractive choice as a CVS replacement.

The first part of the talk introduces a new conversion tool from CVS/RCS to Fossil. The approach and results are compared to existing conversion tools like fromcvs and cvs2svn.

The second part of the talk analyses the performance of Fossil for various important operations and some of the changes made in Fossil to deal with scalability limits. A limited comparison to other VCSs is also provided.

The final part of the talk summarizes the observations to guide an evaluation of the technical side of such a migration process.

Author:

Jörg Sonnenberger is a NetBSD and pkgsrc developer. In NetBSD he has been working on ACPI, the toolchain and other areas. In pkgsrc his main interest are the infrastructure components. He is currently working as software developer in Germany.

P5B: OpenBSD's New Suspend and Resume Framework

Abstract:

Suspend and Resume support in OpenBSD was almost complete in 4.8 Release. However, a lot had to be changed and it was a long process starting from acpi(4) and apm(4) changes down into the low level parts of autoconf(9) and upwards into the device drivers. What started as i386 and amd64 targeted development, turned into a Machine Independent framework that can now be used by other ports. Currently, loongson is one such port that is still work in progress

Author:

Paul Irofti is an OpenBSD developer since 2008, involved in ACPI, suspend and resume, porting and currently with a keen interest in the Loongson and Itanium platforms.

In the past he worked for a telephony company developing VoIP, Voicemail and related software and after that as an antivirus engine developer and reverse engineer. Currently he is a freelancer working at various interesting projects.

In his spare time he enjoys a good game of Go or a nice hike.

P6A: Gcc porting to ximo16 (DSC) with external make check

Abstract:

The tool-chain for commodity CPU (NJRC XIMO16 16bit DSP processor, 64k word address space, sometime referred as DSC) is developed. They are based on GNU tool-chain. Gas, gcc, gdb are included. In doing that, quality assurance of code generation of gcc is pursued with automated execution and result checking. Gcc itself has 'make check' with DejaGNU. It is tcl (and expect) based comparison of the result for compilation and execution. But for cross compiler, checking of execution is neither simple nor easy. In this article, automation based on gdb-simulator-execution is proposed.

Author:

Makoto Fujiwara was working for (roughly) Motorola Japan, being LSI Designer and CAD Engineer in 1978-1999. His area was 8bit peripheral and 8bit Micro Controller. In 1994-1999 he had joined a domestic member of WG2 IEC TC-93 Standard Committee, which was for Design automation, and worked for UDL/I Hardware Description Language. In 1999-2001 he had worked for web marketing at ON Semiconductor and in 2002 for Hardware Modeling Documentation at STARC. Since 2004 he has been working for tool chain development for XIMO16 processor at KINU Corporation, and since 2010 he has joined NetBSD project as a developer (for pkgsrc).

P6B: 10 years of pf

Abstract:

2011 marks the 10th anniversary of OpenBSD's packet filter PF, and in May the project will ship it's 20th release containing this firewall implementation. This talk will present an illustrated history of PF's evolution over this period, with highlights of the major changes, adoption by other projects, and other points of interest. In addition to presenting summary performance data for all 20 releases of OpenBSD containing PF, we will also present more detailed "best case" and "worst case" performance data for the current version of PF on a variety of popular hardware platforms.

Both authors have been involved with PF since it's inaugural release with OpenBSD 3.0, besides actively developing the code, henning@ was possibly the first person to run it in a commercial production environment; and mcbride@ introduced IPv6 support into this release.

Author:

Henning Brauer is 32 in lives in Hamburg, Germany. He is running the Internet Service Provider "BS Web Services" there, for more than 10 years. He joined OpenBSD in 2002 and has been working on many things, most network related, since. He started OpenBGPD and OpenNTPD, the framework he has written for bgpd is used by almost all newer daemons in OpenBSD. He has been working on the OpenBSD packet filter, pf, from the beginning and is now one of the heads behind it. Whe he's not hacking you can find him mountain biking, traveling and hiking or in one of the many bars in his neighborhood with his friends.

P7A: The tmux terminal multiplexer

Abstract:

tmux is a program which allows multiple text terminal processes to be created and managed from a single text terminal. The set of processes running in tmux may be detached from the terminal, continue running in the background and reattached to a different terminal without interruption. It provides the ability to display output on disparate terminals simultaneously and a large set of features for management of child terminals. In development since 2007, since mid-2009 tmux has been part of the OpenBSD base system. This paper presents a brief summary of the motivation for and history of the program, a discussion of its overall design and the construction of some of the major components.

Author:

Nicholas Marriott has been an OpenBSD user since 2002 and developer since 2009, working on tmux, related components such as libevent, ncurses, and other miscellaneous bits and pieces. He lives in Northern Ireland, where he currently works as a software developer in the financial industry.

P7B: Porting Gentoo to DragonFly

Abstract:

Gentoo is one of the more well known Linux distributions. Portage is a package management system used by Gentoo, like ports or pkgsrc: Portage builds everything from source code. Portage is so flexible to work on several CPU architectures, or even on many operating systems. It is used as a ChromeOS build system and Embedded Gentoo project that aim to prepare the build infrastructure for creating images to be installed onto embedded systems.

DragonFly is a BSD-based system. DragonFly has HAMMER (modern high performance filesystem), virtual kernels (run kernel as userland process and ease kernel developing and debugging) or its deadlock-free and easily composable synchronization mechanism. It released version 2.8.2 on Oct-30.

I ported the Gentoo system (Portage and service manager) to DragonFly for the Google Summer of Code 2010. I explain the work that was done.

Author:

Naohiro Aota is undergraduate student at Osaka University. He has my first Linux experience when he was 14 with Fedora Core. Soon he has begun to use Gentoo/Linux and so loved the distribution. Two years ago, he started part time job and was given a computer which had FreeBSD 7.1 installed. He played around with it. One day he noticed a FreeBSD's package management tool written in Ruby got broken, and he decided to replace it with Gentoo/FreeBSD. Although Gentoo/FreeBSD has many good points, it has much bad or buggy points at the same time. He have been trying to fix them and soon he will be a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer. He LOVES reading: Sci-Fi, Fantasy and computer sience books. He likes listening to music and he belongs to a university male chorus circle. He would like to learn as many languages as possible (both natural ones and programming ones :))

P8A: Synchronizing Systems on a LAN: An Introduction to PTPd

Abstract:

For the last 20 years NTP has been the standard way that most computers have been synchronizing their internal clocks with an external reference. While NTP works well in the wide area it is incapable of synchronizing systems into the millisecond range. Applications such as factory automation and robotics require distributed systems with a more accurate sense of time than can be provided by NTP. PTPd is a BSD Licensed, open source, implementation of the IEEE-1588 time protocol which can be used to synchronize systems on a LAN to within a millisecond of an external time source. The daemon is currently developed on top of FreeBSD, and has been shown to run on Linux as well. In this paper we will cover the basics of the Precision Time Protocol, and introduce the PTP daemon and its usage.

Author:

George Neville-Neil works on networking and operating system code for fun and profit. He also teaches various course on subjects related to computer programming. His professional areas of interest include code spelunking, operating systems, networking and security. He is the co-author with Marshall Kirk McKusick of _The Design and Implementaion of the FreeBSD operating system_ and is the columnist behind ACM Queue's "Kode Vicious." Mr. Neville-Neil earned his bachelor's degree in computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a member of the ACM, the Usenix Association and the IEEE. He is an avid bicyclist and traveler who currently resides in New York City.

P8B: OpenBSD SCSI Evolution

Abstract:

Originally the OpenBSD SCSI stack was a minimalist layer designed to convey buffer cache i/o requests from filesystems to a few dumb slow disks on one or two SCSI buses. The hardware adapter code was expected to perform all complex tasks and there was little provision for error reporting or recovery. Resources were statically allocated for all possible targets, not just targets found, with no mechanism for sharing or rebalancing in response to usage patterns. Intertwined layers of assumptions and inappropriate use of theoretically private information resulted in a brittle subsystem likely to react badly to demands outside of the original design goal. And one that was very difficult to understand and maintain.

When commands started to originate outside of the buffer cache code path to handle devices such as SCSI enclosures, the resulting failures of 'important' i/o's created problems leading to the first serious attempts to improve the OpenBSD SCSI code. As fibre channel connections began to appear in common use, along with SAS devices, RAID controllers, disks capable of handling large numbers of concurrent commands, and more devices within the kernel were attached via the SCSI subsystem something had to be done to provide modern capabilities while improving resource usage.

This talk will present the changes made to the SCSI midlayer in the OpenBSD kernel to address these challenges.

Authors:

In real life David Gwynne works as a glorified systems administrator at an Australian university. In his spare time he is a core developer within the OpenBSD project who mostly works on the SCSI layer, the network stack, and their associated drivers.

Kenneth R Wessterback made his first commit to OpenBSD on February 6, 2000. Having purchased an unsupported SCSI card, he was encouraged by deraadt@ to add support for it. Since then Ken has added scsi hardware drivers (e.g. iha(4) and trm(4)); significantly updated others such as adv(4), adw(4), siop(4), ahc(4), ahd(4) and isp(4); worked extensively on the SCSI layer and the install scripts. Over the last two or three years Ken has worked with David Gwyne and others in evolving the SCSI layer to solve many long standing problems. In the real world Ken was the Chief IT Architect for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada until 2010, where he deployed OpenBSD in some infrastructure and patient internet access applications. He is now an independant contractor.

P10A: BSDLUA - evolved Unix scripting

Abstract:

The issue of scriptability of Unix system can seem like a topic resolved a long time ago with shell scripts they are reasonably powerful and can be very tightly integrated with system utilities. However, though it is an old truism that the quality of the program depends mostly on the programmer and not on his tools, newer and better tools can significantly increase productivity and ease maintenance. Lua has many advantages over traditional shell scripts: a cleaner syntax with powerful language features (lexical scoping, OOP, closures), exceptional suitability for interaction with C libraries, a garbage collector and a modular approach which makes writing long programs much cleaner then in shell code. In addition to that, the Lua interpreter is very small, easily embeddable in widely different environments and BSD licensed. BSDLUA is an experimental effort to integrate Lua as a scripting language in a modern Unix environment by providing native Lua-C bindings for a subset of libc, as well as maintaining the ability to invoke and interface with system utilities. By doing this, Lua can be used both for simple shell scripting tasks and for writing more complex system utilities.

Author:

Ivan Voras is a PhD student at the University of Zagreb where he's also employed, but tries not to let this regular job interfere with his work on FreeBSD and other hobbies. He is system administrator and developer, a long-time FreeBSD user and advocate and has as a student worked on several Google Summer of Code projects for FreeBSD.

P10B: Demystifying MPLS --- The MPLS framework in OpenBSD

Abstract:

Work on supporting MPLS started in 2008 at the n2k8 mini-hackathon in Ito (Japan). In the last 2 years much work went into this new framework. Apart from the network stack changes ldpd(8) -- the label distribution protocol daemon -- was developed and bgpd(8) was modified to make it possible to setup and terminate MPLS VPNs on OpenBSD. OpenBSD is probably the first open-source system able to do MPLS out of the box without additional patches. Most people have heard about MPLS but how it actually works is often unknown. MPLS changes the way networking is done. While the label switching part itself is trivial it is just one part of a much larger puzzle. There are changes in many routing protocols and with over 150 RFC about MPLS shows that this is more than just simple label switching.

Author:

Claudio Jeker is a long time OpenBSD developer doing mostly crazy networking stuff. He works for .vantronix a company selling OpenBSD based firewalls and routers.