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FreeBSD Multimedia

FreeBSD Multimedia Resources List

Links on this page refer to multimedia resources (podcast, vodcast, audio recordings, video recordings, photos) related to FreeBSD or of interest for FreeBSD users.

This list is available as chronological overview, as a tag cloud and via the sources.

This list is also available as RSS feed RSS Feed

If you know any resources not listed here, or notice any dead links, please send details to Edwin Groothuis so that it can be included or updated.

Newest resources

December 2008

November 2008

October 2008

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Joerg Sonnenberger - Sleeping beauty - NetBSD on Modern Laptops
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, netbsd, laptops, joerg sonnenberger
    MP3 (1 byte, 54 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 54 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    This paper discusses the NetBSD Power Management Framework (PMF) and related changes to the kernel. The outlined changes allow NetBSD to support essential functions like suspend-to-RAM on most post-Y2K X86 machines. They are also the fundation for intelligent handling of device activity by enabling devices on-demand. This work is still progressing. Many of the features will be available in the up-coming NetBSD 5.0 release The NetBSD kernel is widely regarded to be one of the cleanest and most portable Operating System kernels available. For various reasons it is also assumed that NetBSD only runs well on older hardware. In the summer of 2006 Charles Hannum, one of the founders of NetBSD, left with a long mail mentioning as important issues the lack of proper power management and suspendto- RAM support. One year later, Jared D. McNeill posted a plan for attacking this issue based on ideas derived from the Windows Driver Model. This plan would evolve into the new NetBSD Power Management Framework (PMF for short).

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - George Neville-Neil - Multicast Performance in FreeBSD
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, multicast, freebsd, george neville-neil
    MP3 (1 byte, 39 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 39 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    In the past ten years most of the research in network protocols has gone into TCP, leaving UDP to languish as a local configuration protocol. While the majority of Internet traffic is TCP, UDP remains the only IP protocol that works over multicast and as such has some specific, and interesting uses in some areas of computing. In 2008 we undertook a study of the performance of UDP multicast on both 1Gbps and 10Gbps Ethernet networks in order to see if changing the physical layer of the network would give a linear decrease in packet latency. To measure the possible gains we developed a new network protocol test program, mctest, which is capable of recording packet round trip times from many hosts simultaneously and which we believe accurately represents how many environments use multicast. The mctest program has been integrated into FreeBSD and is now being used to verify the proper operation of multicast on various pieces of 10Gbps hardware.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Robert Watson - FreeBSD Network Stack Performance Optimizations for Modern Hardware
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, network stack, hardware, robert watson
    MP3 (1 byte, 53 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 53 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    The arrival of high CPU core density, with commodity quad-core notebooks and 32-core servers, combined with 10gbps networking have transformed network design principles for operating systems. This talk will describe changes in the FreeBSD 6.x, 7.x, and forthcoming 8.x network stacks required to exploit multiple cores and serve 10gbps networks. The goal of the session will be to introduce the audience to general strategies used to improve performance, their rationales, and their impact on applications and users:
    • Introduction to the SMPng Project and the follow-on Netperf Project
    • Workloads and performance measurement
    • Efficient primitives to support modern network stacks
    • Multi-core and cache-aware network memory allocator
    • Fine-grained network stack locking
    • Load-balancing and contention-avoidance across multiple CPUs
    • CPU affinity for network stack data structures
    • TCP performance enhancements including TSO, LRO, and TOE
    • Zero-copy Berkely Packet Filter (BPF) buffers
    • Direct network stack dispatch from interrupt handlers
    • Multiple input and output queues

    Robert Watson is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory investinging operating system and network security. Prior to joining the Computer Laboratory to work on a PhD, he was Senior Principal Scientist at McAfee Research, now SPARTA ISSO, a leading security research and development organization, directing government and commercial research contracts for customers that include DARPA, the US Navy, and Apple Computer. His research interests include operating system security, network stack structure and performance, and windowing system structure. He is also a member of the FreeBSD Core Team and president of the FreeBSD Foundation.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Pedro Giffuni - Working with Engineering Applications in FreeBSD
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, engineering applications, pedro giffuni
    MP3 (1 byte, 51 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 51 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    In recent years, traditional branches of engineering like Civil, Chemical, Mechanical, Electrical and Industrial Engineering are requiring extensive computing facilities for their needs. Several well known labs (Sandia, Lawrence Livermore) rely on huge clusters to do all types of complex analysis that were unthinkable a couple of decades ago. While the free BSD variants share the environment with traditional UNIX systems, frequently used for such computations, it was not common to find adequate free software packages to carry complex calculations. Eventually commercial versions of important math related packages started to appear for the Linux platform. Even when the big packages were distant, the BSDs learned and adapted in resourceful ways: Matlab and Mathematica, running under Linux emulation, demanded functionality from the BSDs and NetBSD implemented a signal trampoline to be able to run AutoCAD with IRIX binary compatibility. A notable project that was always available under a free license was Berkeley's Spice circuit analysis program, however it was an exception rather than the rule. Even when the scientific community pressed for a while to get other important tools like NASA's FEA package Nastran under a free license, the objective of being able to access and enhance open scientific tools was elusive. About a decade ago the situation started to improve: FreeBSD's ports system started growing exponentially, first with a high content in the math category, afterwards with a CAD section and after sustained growth in those categories a science section was created. This growth was mostly pushed by Universities and their research projects and in general are not well known with respect to the commercial counterparts. I started porting math/engineering code for FreeBSD around 1996. Back then it was absolutely unthinkable for a Mechanical Engineer to depend only on FreeBSD for it's daily work. The situation nowadays is different: there are some very high quality engineering analysis packages like EDF's Code Aster, with more than 12 years of professional development, that just can't be ignored. A Finite Element package, like Code Aster, can easily cost 5000 US$, is priced according to the maximum problem size it can solve, can require yearly licenses, and is rarely available with source code. In NASTRAN's case the source code is only available for US citizens under a yearly fee. Free software does have serious limitations though; just like in office applications there are proprietary CAD formats or sometimes the package simply doesn't have the required functionality. Having the sources, of course, always has the advantage of being able to implement (or pay for) some specific functionality you might need. Many commercial packages have been recently ported to Linux, but even when they gain some of the advantages of an open environment they still have yet another limitation: they have been very slow to make use of the multicored features of the new processors in the market, a huge limitation now that the speed war between processors has been limited by the overheating problem. The objective of the talk is to give an overview of several CAD/CAE packages that have been made available recently as part of FreeBSD's ports system and the decisions that were made to port them. BRLCAD and Varkon are two CAD utilities that made a transition from closed source to an open environment and in the process in the process of getting ported to BSD have gained greater portability and general "bug" fixes critical for their consolidation as usable and maintainable projects. There are also some tricks that have not been well documented: it is possible to enable threads and some extra optimizations on some packages, and it is also possible to replace the standard BLAS library with the faster GOTO BLAS without rebuilding the package. It is also possible to build the packages optimized for a clustered environment, but perhaps what is most interesting of all is how all the packages interrelate with each other and can turn FreeBSD into a complete enginering environment. No OS distribution so far is offering all the engineering specific utilities offered through FreeBSD's ports system: from design to visualization, passing through analysis FreeBSD is becoming an option that can't be ignored, and best of all, it is an effort that will benefit not only FreeBSD but the wider audience.
    Pedro F. Giffuni M. Sc. Industrial Engineering - University of Pittsburgh Mechanical Engineer - Universidad Nacional de Colombia I was born in Bogota, Colombia but I am an Italian citizen. My experience with computers started when I was about 12 years old With the TRS-80 Color Computer first using Basic and the OS-9. I studied electronics for 3 years but became tired of worrying about "whatever happened to electrons in there" and moved to Mechanical Engineering. For a while I rested from the computer world until the Internet came stepping along. I started using FreeBSD around 1995 and soon fell in love with the idea of being able to install a complete version of UNIX from the net with just one floppy. After submitting a the 999th port to the FreeBSD project Walnut Creek was kind enough to give me a subscription for several years to FreeBSD's CD-ROM. Since then I've been on and off porting software packages or fixing the bugs I have caused while porting them. Of course there has always been great respect for the other BSDs and their wonderful license and while I've given up on the idea of one day seeing a "UnifiedBSD" I am glad to see different approaches sharing ideas in a healthful environment.
    Keywords: BSD, engineering, CAE, CAD, math, mechanical, FreeBSD ports

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Brooks Davis - Isolating cluster jobs for performance and predictability
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, cluster, brooks davis
    MP3 (1 byte, 51 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 51 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    The Aerospace Corporation operates a federally funded research and development center in support of national-security, civil and commercial space programs. Many of our 2400+ engineers use a variety of computing technologies to support their work. Applications range from small models which are easily handled by desktops to parameter studies involving thousands of cpu hours and traditional, large scale parallel codes such as computational fluid dynamics and molecular modeling applications. Our primary resources used to support these large applications are computing clusters. Our current primary cluster, the Fellowship cluster consists of 352 dual-processor nodes with a total of 14xx cores. Two additional clusters, beginning at 150 dual-processor nodes each are being constructed to augment Fellowship. As in In any multiuser computing environment with limited resources, user competition for resources is a significant burden. Users want everything they need to do their job, right now. Unfortunately, other users may need those resources at the same time. Thus, systems to arbitrate this resource contention are necessary. On Fellowship we have deployed the Sun Grid Engine scheduler which scheduled batch jobs across the nodes. In the next section we discuss the performance problems that can occur when sharing resources in a high performance computing cluster. We then discuss range of possibilities to address these problems. We then explain the solutions we are investigating and describe our experiments with them. We then conclude with a discussion of future work.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Hauke Fath - Managing BSD desktop clients - Fencing in the herd
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, bsd, desktop, hauke fath
    MP3 (1 byte, 50 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 50 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    The members of the BSD family have traditionally prospered off the desktop, as operating systems on servers and embedded systems. The advent of MacOS X has marked a change, and moved the desktop more into focus. Modern desktop systems create a richer software landscape, with more diverse requirements, than their server counterparts. User demands, software package interdependencies and frequent security issues result in a change rate that can put a considerable load on the admin staff. Without central management tools, previously identical installations diverge quickly. This paper looks at concepts and strategies for managing tens to hundreds of modern, Unix-like desktop clients. The available management tools range from simple, image-based software distribution, mainly used for setting up uniform clients, to "intelligent" rule-based engines capable of search-and-replace operations on configuration files. We will briefly compare their properties and limitations, then take a closer look at Radmind, a suite for file level administration of Unix clients. Radmind has been in use in the Institute of Telecommunication at Technische Universitt Darmstadt for over three years, managing NetBSD and Debian Linux clients in the labs as well as faculty members' machines. We will explore the Radmind suite's underlying concepts and functionality. In order to see how the concept holds up, we will discuss real-world scenarios from the system life-cycle of Installation, configuration changes, security updates, component updates, and system upgrades.
    Hauke Fath works as a systems administrator for the Institut fr Nachrichtentechnik (telecommunication) at Technische Universitt Darmstadt. He has been using NetBSD since 1994, when he first booted a NetBSD 1.0A kernel on a Macintosh SE/30. NetBSD helped shaping his career by causing a slow drift from application programmer's work towards systems and network administration. Hauke Fath holds a MS in Physics and became a NetBSD developer in late 2006.
    Keywords: Managing Unix desktop clients, software distribution, tripwire

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 Keynote - George Neville-Neil - Thinking about thinking code
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, george neville-neil
    MP3 (1 byte, 37 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 37 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    EuroBSDCon 2008 Keynote - George Neville-Neil - Thinking about thinking code

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Yvan Vanhullebus - IPSec tools: past, present and future
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, ipsec, yvan vanhullebus
    MP3 (1 byte, 46 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 46 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    The first part will explain what have been major changes since Manu's presentation at Bale's EuroBSDCon, including more detailed informations on changes which have a significant impact on administrator's bad habits (why the common way of doing it is bad, why it was sometimes needed in the past, how to do it the good way now, why this is far better), on both the UserLand (ipsec-tools project) and maybe in [Free|Net]BSD kernels/ IPSec stacks.
    The second part will talk about the future of the project. News of the next major version (which may be out or about to be out when we'll be ate EuroBSDCon), news works which are planned or which are done but not yet public, but also news about the team: it's new members, new tools, what we would like to do in tue future, a
    Yvan VANHULLEBUS works as an R&D security engineer for NETASQ since 2000, where he works on FreeBSD OS. He started to work on KAME's IPSec stack in 2001, provided many patches for various parts of the stack, then became one of the maintainers of ipsec-tools project, a fork of KAME's userland daemon. He became a NetBSD developper when ipsec-tools was migrated to NetBSD's CVS.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Matthieu Herrb - Input handling in wscons and X.Org
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, wscons, x.org, matthieu herrb
    MP3 (1 byte, 57 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 57 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    This talk will present the different layers that handle input, from the key that gets pressed or the mouse motion to the applications, all the way through the kernel drivers, X drivers and libraries, in the case of the OpenBSD/NetBSD wscons driver and the current and future X.Org server. It will cover stuff like keyboard mappings, touch-screen calibration, multi-pointer X or input coordinates transformations. It will show some problems of current implementations and try to show how current evolutions can solve them.
    Matthieu Herrb is maintaing X on OpenBSD. I've been using X on various systems (SunOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS X,...) since 1989. He has been a member of the XFree86 Core Team for a short period in 2003 and is now a member of the X.Org Foundation BoD. Matthieu Herrb works at LAAS a research laborarory of the French National Research Agency (CNRS) both on robotics and network security.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Paul Richards - eXtreme Programming: FreeBSD a case study
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, extreme programming, paul richards
    MP3 (1 byte, 54 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 54 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    Traditional project management methodologies are typically based on the waterfall model where there are distinct phases: requirements capture, design, implementation, testing, delivery. Once a project has moved on to the next phase there is no going back. The end result is often a late project that no-one wants anymore because the requirements have fundamentally changed by the time the project is delivered.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Edd Barret - Modern Typesetting on BSD
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, typesetting, bsd, edd barrett
    MP3 (1 byte, 33 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 33 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    Edd Barrett will speak about using the BSD Platform as a means of typesetting from a practical standpoint at EuroBSDcon 2008. Edd Barrett does not wish to go into the technicalities of each typesetter, but rather state which are good for certain types of document, and which tools (ports and packages), integrate well with the available typesetters.
    Edd Barrett os a student from the UK, currently on "placement year" as a systems administrator for Bournemouth University. Open Source *NIX has been his platform of choice for many years and he has been using OpenBSD for about 3 years now, simply because it is small, clean, correct and secure. Just recently he has started developing things I want or need for OpenBSD.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Anttii Kantee - Converting kernel file systems to services
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, anttii kantee
    MP3 (1 byte, 55 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 55 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    ABSD/UNIX operating system is traditionally split into two pieces: the kernel and userspace. Historically the reasons for this were clear: the UNIX kernel was a simple entity. However, over time the kernel has grown more and more complex. Currently, most of the same functionality is available both in userspace and the kernel, but under different names. Examples include synchronization routines and threading support. For instance, to lock a mutex in the NetBSD kernel, the call is mutex_enter(), while in userspace the routine which does exactly the same thing is known as pthread_mutex_enter(). Taking another classic example, a BSD style OS has malloc()/free() available both in userspace and the kernel, but with different linkage (the kernel malloc interface is currently being widely deprecated, though). This imposes a completely arbitrary division between the kernel and userspace. Most functionality provided by an opearating system should be treated as a service instead of explicitly pinning it down as a userspace daemon or a kernel driver. Currently, due to the arbitrarily difference in programming interface names, functionality must be explicitly ported between the kernel and userspace if it is to run in one or the other environment. By unifying the environments where possible, the arbitrary division is weakened and porting between these environments becomes simpler.
    Antti Kantee has been a NetBSD developer for many many moons. He has managed to work on quite a few bits and pieces of a BSD system: userland utilities, the pkgsrc packaging system, networking, virtual memory, device drivers, hardware support and file systems.
    See also http://www.netbsd.org/docs/puffs/rump.htm

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Paeps Philip - How-to embed FreeBSD
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, embed, freebsd, philip paeps
    MP3 (1 byte, 43 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 43 minutes), PDF (1 byte, 17 pages)

    This paper provides a how-to embed FreeBSD. A console server built form an AT91RM9200 based ARM system will be explored. This paper will talk about the selection of hardware. It will explore creating images for the target system, as well as concentrate on different alternatives for deploying the system. A number of different options exist today, and no comprehensive guide for navigating through the choices exists today. This paper will explore the different alternatives that exist today for producing images targeted at different size requirements. The differing choices for storage in an embedded environment are explored. The techniques used to access rich debugging environments are discussed.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Aggelos Economopoulos - An MP-capable network stack for DragonFlyBSD with minimal use of locks
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, dragonflybsd, mp, network stack, aggelos economopoulos
    MP3 (1 byte, 42 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 42 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    Given the modern trend towards multi-core shared memory multiprocessors, it is inconceivable for production OS kernels not to be reentrant. The typical approach for allowing multiple execution contexts to simultaneously execute in kernel mode has been to use fine-grained locking for synchronising access to shared resources. While this technique has been proven efficient, empirical evidence suggests that the resulting locking rules tend to be cumbersome even for the experienced kernel programmer, leading to bugs that are hard to diagnose. Moreover, scaling to more processors requires extensive use of locks, which may impose unnecessary locking overhead for small scale multiprocessor systems. This talk will describe the typical approach and then discuss the alternative approach taken in the DragonFlyBSD network stack. We will give an overview of the various protocol threads employed for network I/O processing and the common-case code paths for packet reception and transmission. Additionally, we'll need to make a passing reference to DragonFlyBSD's message passing model. This should establish a baseline, allowing us to focus on the recent work by the author to eliminate use of the Big Giant Lock in the performance-critical paths for the TCP and UDP protocols. The decision to constrain this work on the two by far most widely-used transport protocols was made in order to (a) limit the amount of work necessary and (b) explore the effectiveness of the approach on the cases that matter at this point in time.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Ion-Mihai Tetcu - Improving FreeBSD ports/packages quality
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, ports, packages, ion-mihai tetcu
    MP3 (1 byte, 56 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 56 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    This talk is focused on ways to improve the quality of FreeBSD's ports and packages and it's partially based on the 5 months experience of writing and running the consecutive versions of "QA Tindy".
    Ion-Mihai "IOnut" Tetcu is a 28 years old FreeBSD ports committer and maintains about 40 ports scattered in the Ports Tree. He lives in Bucharest, Romania where he runs and co-owns an IT& company and he's a member of Romanian FreeBSD and FreeUnix User Group (RoFUG). His non-IT interests include history, philosophy and mountain climbing.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Michael Dexter - Zen and the Art of Multiplicity Maintenance: An applied survey of BSD-licensed multiplicity strategies from chroot to mult
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, bsd, michael dexter
    MP3 (1 byte, 38 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 38 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    Many BSD-licensed strategies of various levels of maturity exist to implement multiplicity, herein defined as the introduction of plurality to traditionally singular computing environments via isolation, virtualization, or other method. For example, the chroot utility introduces an additional isolated root execution environment within that of the host; or an emulator provides highly-isolated virtual systems that can run complete native or foreign operating systems. Motivations for multiplicity vary, but a demonstrable desire exists for users to obtain root or run a foreign binary or operating system. We propose a hands-on survey of portable and integrated BSD-licensed multiplicity strategies applicable to the FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD and NetBSD operating systems on the i386 architecture. We will also address three oft-coupled disciplines: software storage devices, the installation of operating system and userlands in multiplicity environments plus the management of select multiplicity environments. Finally we will comment on each strategies potential limits of isolation, compatibility, independence and potential overhead in comparison to traditional systems. Keywords: multiplicity, virtualization, chroot, jail, hypervisor, xen, compat.
    Michael Dexter has used Unix systems since 1991 and BSD-licensed multiplicity strategies for over five years. He is the Program Manager at the BSD Fund and Project Manager of the BSD.lv Project.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Constantine Murenin - OpenBSD Hardware Sensors Framework
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, openbsd, hardware sensors, constantine murenin
    MP3 (1 byte, 47 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 47 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    In this talk, we will discuss the past and present history and the design principles of the OpenBSD hardware sensors framework. Sensors framework provides a unified interface for storing, registering and accessing information about hardware monitoring sensors. Sensor types include, but are not limited to, temperature, voltage, fan RPM, time offset and logical drive status. The framework spans sensor_attach(9), sysctl(3), sysctl(8), sensorsd(8), ntpd(8), snmpd(8) and more than 67 drivers, ranging from I2C temperature sensors and Super I/O hardware monitors to IPMI, RAID and SCSI enclosures. Several third-party tools are also available, for example, a plug-in for Nagios and ports/sysutils/symon. Originally based on some ideas from NetBSD, the framework has sustained many improvements in OpenBSD, and was ported and committed to FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD.
    Constantine A. Murenin is an MMath graduate student at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo (CA). Prior to his graduate appointment, Constantine attended and subsequently graduated from East Carolina University (US) and De Montfort University (UK), receiving two bachelor degrees in computer science, with honors and honours respectively. A FreeBSD Google Summer of Code 2007 Student, OpenBSD Committer and Mozilla Contributor, Constantine's interests range from standards compliance and usability at all levels, to quiet computing and hardware monitoring.
    http://Constantine.SU/

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - George Neville-Neil - Four years of summer of code
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, google soc, george neville-neil
    MP3 (1 byte, 27 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 27 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    The Google Summer of Code is a program designed to provide students with real world experience contributing to open source projects during the summer break in university studies. Each year Google selects a number of open source projects to act as mentoring organizations. Students are invited to submit project proposals for the open source projects that are most interesting to them. FreeBSD was one of the projects selected to participate in the inaugural Summer of Code in 2005 and we have participated each year since then. Over the past 4 years a total of 79 students have participated in the program and it has become a very significant source of new committers to FreeBSD. This talk will examine in detail the selection criteria for projects, the impact that successful projects have had, and some suggestions for how we can better leverage this program in the future.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Nick Barkas - Dynamic memory allocation for dirhash in UFS2
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, ufs2, nick barkas
    MP3 (1 byte, 32 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 32 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    Hello My name is Nick Barkas. I'm a master's student studying scientific computing at Kungliga Tekniska hgskolan (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. I have just begun work on a Google Summer of Code project with FreeBSD: Dynamic memory allocation for dirhash in UFS2 . I would like to present my results from this project at EuroBSDCon this year. This project is very much a work in progress now so it is a bit difficult to summarize what I would ultimately present. I will try to describe an outline, though. First I will give background information on dirhash: an explanation of the directory data structure in UFS2, how directory lookups in this structure necessitate a linear search, and how dirhash speeds these lookups up without having to change anything about the directory data structure. Next I will explain the current limitation that dirhash's maximum memory use must be manually specified by administrators, or left at a small conservative default of 2MB. I will explain some different methods I will have explored to try and make this maximum memory limit dynamically increase and decrease as the system has more or less free memory, and which method I will have ultimately settled on and implemented. Then I'll present some test results of performance of operations on very large directories with and without dynamic memory allocation enabled for dirhash. Next I will talk about how speed gains from dirhash are limited by the fact that the hash tables exist only in memory and must be recreated after each system boot, as big directories are scanned for the first time, or even have to be recreated for a directory that has not been scanned in some time if its dirhash has been discarded to free memory. These problems can be eliminated by using an on-disk index for directory entries. I will talk about some of the challenges of implementing on-disk indexing, such as remaining backwards compatible with older versions of UFS2 and interoperating properly with softupdates. Then, if my SoC project has permitted me time to work on this aspect of it, I will explain some possible methods for adding directory indexing to UFS2 that meets these challenges, and which of those ideas I will have implemented. Finally I will present results of some benchmarks on this filesystem with indices, and compare to performance with dirhash, and with no indices or dirhashes.
    Keywords: dirhash, ufs2, filesystems, performance tuning

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Russel Sutherland - UTORvpn: A BSD based VPN service for the masses
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, freebsd, vpn, russel sutherland
    MP3 (1 byte, 52 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 52 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    The University of Toronto is a large educational institutional with over 70,000 students and 10,000 staff and faculty. For the past three years, we have developed and implemented a ubiquitous VPN service, based up on OpenVPN and FreeBSD. The service has over 3000 active customers, with up to 35 simultaneous users. The system supports, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista/2000 clients. Tools have been developed to create a central CA which enables users to log in to a secure server and get their customized client, certificates and configuration. The NSIS installer is used to generate the customized windows installers. Similar packages are generated for the various Unix based clients. Additional WWW/PHP based tools, have been developed to monitor and log usage of the service, using standard graphs, alarms for excessive use and a certificate revocation mechanism. The system has been integrated into the local identity management system (Kerberos/LDAP) in order to authorize and authenticate users upon initiation and per session usage. All code is Open Source and freely available.

  • EuroBSDCon 2008 - Martin Schuette - Improved NetBSD Syslogd
    Source: EuroBSDCon
    Added: 22 October 2008
    Tags: eurobsdcon, eurobsdcon2008, netbsd, syslogd, martin schuette
    MP3 (1 byte, 42 minutes), OGG (1 byte, 42 minutes), PDF (1 byte, n pages)

    Martin Schuette has three main goals, defined by three internet drafts to implement:
    • TLS transport is the most obvious improvement: it provides a reliable network transport with data encryption and peer authentication. To make full use of this a buffering mechanism to bridge temporary network errors is implemented as well.
    • Syslog-protocol extends the message format to use a complete timestamp, include a fully qualified domain name, and allow UTF-8 messages. It also offers a structured data field to unambiguously encode application dependent information.
    • Syslog-sign will allow any syslog sender to digitally sign its messages, so their integrity can be verified later. This enable the detection of loss, deletion or other manipulation syslog data after network transfer or archiving on storage media.

    Martin Schuette is a student of computer science in Potsdam, Germany, and has been working as a part-time system administrator for BSD servers since 2004.
    In 2007 Martin Schuette already gave a talk on Syslog at the Chemnitze Linux-Tage (http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2007/vortraege/detail.html?idx=547 in german; for a newer english version see these slides for a seminar talk: http://fara.cs.uni-potsdam.de/~mschuett/uni/syslog-protocols-080522.pdf).

  • New York City BSD Con 2008: BSD v. GPL - a.k.a. not the sequel to "BSD is Dying"
    Source: New York City *BSD User Group
    Added: 14 October 2008
    Tags: nycbsdcon, nycbsdcon2008, presentation, humor, bsd versus gpl, jason dixon
    MP4 (15 Mb)

    BSD vs GPL is a sweeping epic, focused on the dichotomy between good and evil. It peers inside the hearts and minds of the creators of these movements and dissects their battle for world domination. No common documentary will dare to follow the path that BSD vs GPL blazes.

  • New York City BSD Con 2008
    Source: New York City *BSD User Group
    Added: 13 October 2008
    Tags: nycbsdcon2008, nycbsdcon, presentation
    Jeremy C. Reed: Introduction to DNSSEC. (15 Mb), Michael Lucas: Network Refactoring, or doing an oil change at 80 MPH. (10 Mb), Anders Magnusson: Design and Implementation of the Portable C Compiler. (15 Mb), Jason Dixon: BSD versus GPL. (4 Mb), Kurt Miller: OpenBSD's Position Independent Executables (PIE) Implementation. (10 Mb), Metthew Dillon: The HAMMER File System. (14 Mb), Pawel Jakub Dawidek: A closer look at the ZFS file system. (16 Mb), Jason L Wright: When Hardware Is Wrong, or "They can Fix It In Software". (9 Mb), Michael Shalayeff: Porting PCC. (11 Mb), Adrian Chadd: High-throughput concurrent disk IO in FreeBSD. (14 Mb), Mike Silbersack: Detecting TCP regressions with tcpdiff. (11 Mb), Julio M. Merino Vidal: An introduction to the Automated Testing Framework (ATF) for NetBSD. (10 Mb)

    Audio recordings of presentations given at New York City BSD Conference 2008. Courtesy of nikolai at fetissov.org. The main page also has links to the slides.

  • Live from NYCBSDCon Sunday
    Source: bsdtalk
    Added: 13 October 2008
    Tags: bsdtalk, nycbsdcon2008, nycbsdcon, interview
    Ogg version (25 minutes), MP3 version (12 Mb, 25 minutes)

    A copy of Sunday's live stream from NYCBSDCon 2008.

  • Live from NYCBSDCon Saturday
    Source: bsdtalk
    Added: 12 October 2008
    Tags: bsdtalk, nycbsdcon2008, nycbsdcon, interview, jason dixon, pawel jakub dawidek, kris more, matt olander, george neville-neil, phillip coblentz, jason wright
    Ogg version (40 minutes), MP3 version (18 Mb, 40 minutes)

    A copy of Saturday's live stream from NYCBSDCon 2008. I wander around during lunch talking to random people. Voices include Jason Dixon, Pawel Jakub Dawidek, Kris Moore, Matt Olander, George Neville-Neil, Phillip Coblentz, and Jason Wright.

  • Kris Moore
    Source: bsdtalk
    Added: 06 October 2008
    Tags: bsdtalk, interview, kris more, pc-bsd
    Ogg version (12 minutes), MP3 version (6 Mb, 12 minutes)

    Interview with Kris Moore. We talk about the recent release of PC-BSD 7.0.

September 2008

  • Interview with Chess Griffin
    Source: bsdtalk
    Added: 26 September 2008
    Tags: bsdtalk, interview, chess griffin, linuxreality
    Ogg version (24 minutes), MP3 version (11 Mb, 24 minutes)

    Interview with Chess Griffin, host of the LinuxReality podcast. We talk about his use of Linux and recent exploration into the BSDs.

  • Questions for you
    Source: bsdtalk
    Added: 16 September 2008
    Tags: bsdtalk
    Ogg version (6 minutes), MP3 version (3 Mb, 6 minutes)

    • Things have been very busy at the beginning of the school year, so I'm sorry that I haven't been producing as many shows as usual.
    • Registration is open for NYCBSDCon and the list of speakers is available. Are you going?
    • I plan on streaming live during the conference. Do you have any suggestions for live streaming software that is known to work well on the BSDs? Are there any live CDs like Dyne:bolic?
    • I've come into possession of a Soekris 5501. What are your suggestions for soekris-friendly projects to test?

August 2008

July 2008

  • Martin Tournoij from DaemonForums.org
    Source: bsdtalk
    Added: 23 July 2008
    Tags: bsdtalk, interview, daemonforums, martin tournoij
    Ogg version (7 minutes), MP3 version (3 Mb, 7 minutes)

    A brief interview with Martin Tournoij, one of the founders of DaemonForums.org.

  • Matthew Dillon
    Source: bsdtalk
    Added: 09 July 2008
    Tags: bsdtalk, interview, hammer, matthew dillon
    Ogg version (30 minutes), MP3 version (14 Mb, 30 minutes)

    An interview with Matthew Dillon. He gives a fairly technical description of the HAMMER filesystem features that will make it in the DragonflyBSD 2.0 release.

  • Configuration Management with Cfengine
    Source: New York City *BSD User Group
    Added: 03 July 2008
    Tags: nycbug, presentation, configuration management, cfengine
    MP3 version (6 Mb, 58 minutes)

    Configuration Management with Cfengine

    Cfengine is a policy-based configuration management system. Its primary function is to provide automated configuration and maintenance of computers, from a policy specification.

    The cfengine project was started in 1993 as a reaction to the complexity and non-portability of shell scripting for Unix configuration management, and continues today. The aim was to absorb frequently used coding paradigms into a declarative, domain-specific language that would offer self-documenting configuration.

    about the speaker:
    Steven Kreuzer has been working with Open Source technologies since as long as he can remember, starting out with a 486 salvaged from a dumpster behind his neighborhood computer store. In his spare time he enjoys doing things with technology that have absolutely no redeeming social value.

June 2008

May 2008