Third day at BSDCan 2016 conference

(followup on previous article)

Dan officially opened the conference as usual, under supervision by Groff of course, now a regular attendee of all conferences :)

Dan & Groff

Groff

We seem to have a lot of newcomers this year as illustrated by all the people raising their hands.

Newcomers

There was some hardware donations during this opening session, with Shawn Webb giving away RPi3 to several people like the newest committer in any BSD, the oldest one and so on. TL; DR: Kirk & Rod won one :)

Shawn & Dan

Like last year, BSDCan is having an additional track which means 33% more talks \o/

Morning

Of course I can’t go to every talk to as usual, I had to choose.

Started with a talk about what is VXLAN, a way to create lots of VLAN-like kind of network over UDP/multicast. It was created by VMWare and has been implemented in all the major OS like FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux (in addition of ESX and cisco).

VXLAN

Next was the Capsicum/Casper talk on what was Capsicum at the beginning and how casper was born, first as a daemon ad next as a library. Interesting comparisons with pledge(2) was well.

Sandboxing

During the lunch break, we had a nice OpenZFS BoF with both Matthew Ahrens and AllanJude, the former being one of the original authors of ZFS back at Sun.

Matt on SoonInZFS

It is exciting to see who ZFS has kept on growing since the fork from Oracle, we will finally have encryption support in OpenZFS \o/

The next talk was about fighting the current streak of Monoculture happening in Tor where most of the nodes (relays and exit ones) are mostly Linux boxes; like in any monoculture, flaws and weaknesses spread faster. Some of the figures are really bad :(

By OS

Bandwidth monoculture

Then I had this talk about how PAM became the nightmare it is right from the beginning at Sun to OpenPAM and the other stuff. Groff was there as well to supervise Michael Lucas’ talk :)

Groff

The end of the day was another talk by Matthew Ahrens about some performances (up to like 2x faster!) improvements for writes in OpenZFS. This will be upstreamed soon and be in OpenZFS next year or so.

OpenZFS

End of day one, pictures as usual there