[Ukfreebsd] Recap: FreeBSD developer summit in Cambridge in August

[Robert Watson]

Dear all:

I was going to send some e-mail around at the time, but since the list was 
broken, I didn't.  However, I thought I would send it now though, just to 
remind people that we are alive and kicking in the UK.

Between about 15 August and 18 August, we hosted a FreeBSD developer summit in 
Cambridge, UK.  Developer summits are invitation-only events (although often 
with lots of guests) at which developers meet up to talk kernels, debugging, 
releases, and, of course, socialize.  We hosted daytime activities at the 
Computer Laboratory in West Cambridge, and most developers stayed at King's 
College, Cambridge.  The joint focuses of this developer summit were network 
stack virtualization and punting (we did this twice, and one unnamed developer 
fell in).  You can find a brief wiki page on the schedule here, not all of 
the slides are there yet though:

   http://wiki.freebsd.org/200808DevSummit

Among our guests were two gentleman from Citrix (was: XenSource) in Cambridge, 
who gave a nice talk on Xen internals, and also their enthusiasm for FreeBSD 
working well with Xen.  As some of you may know, FreeBSD 8-CURRENT includes 
Xen DomU support, but there's a lot left to do (including get it merged to 
FreeBSD 7.x, ideally in time for FreeBSD 7.2).  We also had talks on a variety 
of other topics, including variant symlinks, our general work on network stack 
virtualization for 8.x, kernel privilege and capability models, FreeBSD 8.0, 
application compatibility, SSL (Ben Laurie was one of our guests, although by 
the end of the weekend he was signed up as a new FreeBSD committer), etc.

The summit was, I think, extremely successful.  Largely, we attracted 
developers from the UK and Europe, although we had one (Brooks Davis) from the 
US, bringing us to around 20ish.  The last FreeBSD developer summit in Ottawa, 
in contrast, was about 70, but this was still a good number.  And hopefully 
good practice for organizing EuorBSDCon 2009 in Cambridge next year!

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge