brueffer’s blog

Last weekend the Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon) took place at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin, Germany. It was the first time this conference took place and all I can say is that it was great. It was a low cost event (5 euro admission fee) and the organizers did an awesome job. Everything ran smoothly, WLAN worked(!), and the overall atmosphere was great.

My talk on Saturday, “FreeBSD im Überblick” (FreeBSD Overview), seemed to have been well received. There were about 25 people in the audience. All in all, there was great service for speakers. Free food and beverages, a quiet room to prepare for the talks and of course lots of beer at the social event

The BSD booth was populated by FreeBSD, NetBSD and even DragonFly BSD people. OpenBSD had a separate booth with the usual merchandising. For FreeBSD, we distributed flyers and CDs. In addition to that, there was a demo PC running FreeBSD 6.1 and KDE that people could play with. As usual, the other BSD folks were great company and I met some people I only knew by name till then.

Unfortunately, relatively few people attended the conference (around 350 I heard somewhere). This was probably due to the great weather and the soccer world cup. I hope FrOSCon will attract some more people next year.

Nothing left to say other than looking forward to FrOSCon 2007!

Links to pictures and other reviews can be found in the FrOSCon Wiki.

My slides can be found at
http://people.freebsd.org/~brueffer/slides/FreeBSD_im_Ueberblick_FrOSCon06.pdf

If you are confused that the aac(4) driver says you have a SCSI controller even though you have a SATA controller (or vice versa), update to the latest CURRENT, or RELENG_6 in a couple of days. Several device names have been corrected.

Moreover, the aac(4) manpage now actually lists all supported controllers. If you are shopping for SCSI/SATA/SAS controllers, this may be worth a look.

So apparently one needs a blog these days to be cool, so I followed the lemmings and registered one as well, courtesy of Erwin Lansing (erwin) and Florent Thoumie (flz).

In other news, I just committed modifications to the my(4) driver to make it usable with the ALTQ packet queuing system. In the past, these modifications led to lock order reversals. Thanks to the work of John Baldwin (jhb) on network driver locking, this is no longer a problem and everything works as expected.

I wonder how many people actually use my(4)...