Location

Dude, where's my packages?

Introducing the FreeBSD package building cluster, or, "Dude, where's my packages?"

The FreeBSD ports management team (portmgr) maintains a cluster of machines to build packages from individual ports. This talk attempts to explain the technical challenges involved.

    * Introduction: the purpose of the build cluster
    * Introduction: the dispatch machine 'pointyhat'
    * Introduction: the package build nodes
    * Release builds, incremental builds, and experimental builds
    * What is done with the results of package builds
    * Discussion of the scheduling algorithm
    * Performance characterization of individual nodes
    * Common problems seen on the nodes
    * Common problems seen on pointyhat
    * Notes on characterizing the overall performance

Location

With the advent of low cost wireless chipsets, wireless mesh networks became much more attractive for both companies, governments, and the general consumer. This talk will describe the FreeBSD implementation of 802.11s.

Wireless mesh networks are being used extensively since the popularization of the 802.11 wireless technologies, but usually they worked with the help of layer 3 routing technologies. Since 802.11 didn't provide any kind of support for wireless mesh networks, in 2004, IEEE created the Task Group s (TGs) to create a new amendment to 802.11 which would define the operation of a wireless mesh network using existing 802.11 hardware and having a routing protocol work at layer 2. Later, the amendment also included provisions for mesh authentication, encryption, link management, bridging mesh networks with other types of networks, and channel reservation.

On this lecture I will talk about the FreeBSD implementation of 802.11s that's available in version 8.0 and beyond. This work was sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation.

Location

The quest for a better kernel development environment

Developing good code is hard. Developing good operating system code is harder still. This talk will cover in as concise and complete a manner as possible, the information obtained during my quest for a better FreeBSD kernel development environment.

My work on the FreeBSD TCP stack ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) involves a great deal of time spent investigating behaviour within the kernel. Becoming frustrated with my development cycle, I started researching and creating a hardware and software development environment that would improve my productivity. I found that so much of the really useful information came from non-authoritative sources scattered around the Internet and from talking with other developers. This talk attempts to collate everything into a single place, with the aim of lowering the barrier to entry for kernel hacking by making useful information more accessible.

Covering everything from hardware considerations to PXE booting and entry level use of KGDB, this talk aims to arm budding to intermediate FreeBSD developers alike with the information and tools required to code more correctly and efficiently than they otherwise might have been able to using more primitive means.

Note that the paper this talk is based on is far from a comprehensive reference yet, and I welcome all suggestions for improvement. My goal is to get the information incorporated into a more official FreeBSD documentation source (e.g. the FreeBSD developer's handbook ) once it has reached critical mass.