## USENIX '99 ## Chris Watson I arrived in Monterey at about 6:30pm. It was nice and cool when I stepped off the plane. I love the climate in Monterey. Considering that Omaha was hot as !@#$ when I left. After getting my bags off of the baggage pickup area, I walked outside the airport to get a cab to the hotel. I lucked out as there was only one cab sitting out front. I wasn't the only one looking for a cab though. Todd Miller was also there and wanted a cab to his hotel. Todd was giving a talk about about programming securely under OpenBSD. So we split the cab ride to our hotels which were just across the street from each other. After paying the cab driver and wishing Todd good luck on his talk I bolted into the hotel to check in and get comfy. I arrived around 6:50 pm. I check in, took my bag of free cookies and headed up to check out my room. The Double Tree hotel in Monterey is great. Nice view of the city or bay depending on which way your room faces. After scoping out the room for a few I hopped in the shower to prepare for the FreeBSD dinner that night. Around 7:15pm I decided to head off and explore Fisherman's Wharf. The restaurant we were eating dinner at tonight was Abalonetti's. So I decided to take a walk down the wharf and scope it out. I found it not to far from the hotel. The dinner was not until 9pm but I didn't have much else to do and wanted to start writing this report so I sat down at the bar and decided to just drink a few and wait for everyone. The place served no Guiness though. How is anyone supposed to eat at a place that does not have Guiness . So I settled for iced tea. Again the weather in Monterey is just killer. 70 degrees, a slight breeze, and the ocean. Anyone have a job opening in the Bay Area? One cool thing about the bar here in the restaurant is its solid brass. I bet this thing is hell to keep shiny. Four people for the dinner just walked in. One of them (John) is from Berkeley. He is handing out simm modules from a DEC Alpha 3100 workstation. This will make a nice keychain. Thanks John. And now Pat Lynch and a few people with him just walked in. Looks like the games are about to begin. We get the entire front room of the restaurant for dinner. Which is kinda cool. Dinner was not that great. Thirty-two bucks for semi-decent food. But its the company that mattered at this meal. Everyone enjoyed themselves and much merriment was had by all. After our meal everyone paid their share of the tab and headed outside to take a big group photo. This concludes Tuesday night's main attraction. It was a really good time. Wednesday at 8:30am. I am sitting in the Sierra grand ballroom. Location of the talks for today. Right up front in the 4th row. I wanted to be early so I could get a good seat. Avi Rubin, who is giving the keynote address this morning is doing the usual socializing 20 feet from me up near the middle podium. There are three podiums; left, right and center. I picked up my registration packet a few minutes before I sat down. It has plenty of good reading in it to keep me busy at night. David Greenman has arrived. He just walked by me. Justin Gibbs is sitting in front of me with his laptop. Reading mail and whatnot in I believe KDE. David is sitting across from me to my left across the aisle. Very cool indeed. Even Kirk McKusick, the man himself, is 2 rows in front of me. The opening talk on Tcl was good if your into that kind of thing. But I have been waiting for Kirk's talk at 11:00am on Soft Updates. Kirk's talk was pretty streamlined and went well. Pretty good talk over all. Next, Jason Evans gave his talk on a transaction based FS for BSD. Not to bad. The talks continued with the Firewire driver on FBSD, and Greg Lehey's talk on Vinum. Vinum is a really nice volume manager. It allows you to do RAID 0-5. Before Greg's talk, the FreeBSD people, David, Jordan, etc.. were up front talking to the newconfig people from Japan trying to resolv the issues with newbus and newconfig. I hope that works out. I did not stay for the last 2 talks because they had nothing to do with FreeBSD. This concludes the talks for today. To read about the papers for each talk given, see the USENIX web site to download the papers. You must be a USENIX member for access though. I just thought I would also mention that female attendance was fair. I noticed quite a few females in the room. I am guessing around 25-50 female attendees. That is encouraging to me. Everyone has moved into the main vendor lobby to check out all the vendors and their offerings. Refreshments were made available as well. No fights have broken out yet between the FreeBSD and Linux camps, which is good I guess. Although I did catch a certain FreeBSD person in the hall talking to Theodore Tso about Larry McVoy's benchmarks and how he uses them for negative purposes. Thursday 9:00am. I am early again today. Brought some apple juice and a cheese danish with me this time. I am looking forward to the first talk today by Andrew on gigabit networking with FreeBSD and Trapeze. His talk was outstanding! He described in detail how by implementing zero-copy TCP and checksum offloading, FreeBSD surpasses 1,000MB/sec! Holy daemons! Of course we all knew it could and this should not really surprise anyone. After a short break, we all piled back into the ballroom to listen to Wilfredo Sanchez talk about the commercial use of open source OS' into commercial OS design. His talk was great! He described how happy Apple was to be taking advantage of a *solid* BSD code base and adding value added features like the Mac GUI, and other Apple features. Apple is apparently very pleased with using BSD OS's to base their Mac OS X on. This is very good news IMO. At one point some Linux zealots tried to turn this into a GPL vs BSD license talk. But that was killed fast. And surprisingly another good talk was from the creator of GNOME. He is a very funny person. And even though I do not prefer GNOME on my desktop, his talk and slides made me think GNOME is just buggy because it is in it's early stages. It is designed with modularity in mind, and is written as a set of components each one not necessarily relying on any of the others. He made the design sound pretty solid. I tip my hat to him. The next two talks were on Meta, a free MTA from Sweden, and Pk, a POSIX threaded kernel. Frank Miller said one thing that caught my attention on his choice of licensing for Pk. He said at first he released it under the GPL but within a week he had so many emails saying that if he was using this as an embedded kernel it had to be under the BSD license because the GPL wouldnt fly in the commercial world. So he changed it because he is really only doing this for fun and didnt really give a hoot. He also mentioned that he is starting to receive some uploaded bug fixes and the like to his site now.. and that Pk is just starting to take off. It's around 5:30pm. I am across the street at the Marriott in the San Carlos III room waiting for the FreeBSD BoF to begin! This is my first BoF, so I am looking forward to it. The room is packed with around 140 people. The BoF was a nice casual chat with 5 of the FreeBSD crew. Two things popped up of more than casual interest. One was the announcement of Whistle being bought by IBM, and the second was a question by Pat Lynch to Jordan about the rumor that Walnut Creek is in negotiations to be bought. Jordan said, "There are discussions but nothing is signed and I cannot talk about it". He also stated that "It would be a company that uses FreeBSD *alot* and that it would be in everyones best interest, for FreeBSD and the un-named company, if it happens." That even threw me for a loop. I hope it works out and that he is right, that FreeBSD would really benefit from WC being bought. Friday at 11:00am. This is the last day of talks. The only talk I am planning on going to is Satoshi's talk on the FreeBSD Ports Collection. The talk was pretty good overall. He briefly touched on the ports system MkII, but did not say exactly when it was going in or what exactly it did better than the current one. I think it is going in RSN. I have decided to blow off the last few talks since they dont really pertain to FreeBSD. I think I will kick back and relax today.. maybe stroll around Fisherman's Wharf and then head down at 4pm for the USENIX Quiz Show! The quiz show was hosted by Rob Kolstad of BSDI. Who knew Rob was this funny. He is quite entertaining. The show took on the shape of Jeopardy. The funniest part of all was when Rob asked one of the NetBSD members to throw one of their "unofficial" NetBSD shirts on stage so everyone could get a look at it. Rob asked if the audience had seen the this shirt. The NetBSD people hesitated for a few seconds, and then threw one of the shirts on stage. Rob picked it up, held it up for all to see, and asked for the camera people filming the conference to get a closeup of it. It had a graphic of a penguin being bent over and a BSD Daemon behind it doing what could only be called "mating" in polite terms. The caption underneath was "NetBSDality". Funniest thing I have ever seen. Rob would not show what was on the back though. Apparently it was even more offensive. The crowd was knee deep in laughs over this shirt. If any of the NetBSD core have an extra one of those shirts I would *really* love to get one. My email is below if you have an extra. All in all, a very funny, excellent ending to 3 days of geeks, BSD and good times. I hope to see you all there next year! I would like to thank Pat Lynch, for the FreeBSD dinner, and Jordan, David, and the other session chairs as well. Last but not least, let's all make sure '00 is a strong year for FreeBSD!! - Chris $Id: usenix.txt,v 1.1 2000/02/16 08:07:53 jim Exp $