FOSDEM 2005
Wow, this one rocked even more than last two. Martin and Dogi weren't around
this time, so I was a bit worried at first. But in the end, hanging out with the
Hurd hackers like Marcus or Neal was as much fun as expected.
Thursday
The saga started on Thursday evening at a subway station in Garching near
Munich, where I picked up Holger Blasum from the FFII and a random girl which
saw my note at mitfahrgelegenheit.de. It turned out that the FFII had just
gotten a warning about the EU ministry council wanting to put their version of
the software patent directive on Monday's fishery council agenda. During the
trip to Frankfurt, Holger vigorously phoned people from all over europe trying
to get a confirmation on the issue and also to rally support against this
looming agenda item.(Damn. One week later, the ministry council has acked its software patents
directive) We arrived at Frankfurt around midnight and while Holger slept
at a fellow FFII supporter's place, I spent the night at my parent's house.
Friday
I picked up Holger again in Frankfurt in the morning (a little later than I
planned) and after some minor navigation errors we were on the way to Brussels.
We made a stop in Jülich to visit the Credativ crowd in their office.
We arrived just when they had their lunch break, amu (Andreas Müller) had given
me directions the previous night and it was pretty easy to find. They are
located in the 'Technologiezentrum'
vaguely outside of Jülich and have half a dozen of nice bureaus. I talked a bit
with Noel and amu and then later had an extensive conversation with Michael
Meskes about the current state of Debian with regard to Ubuntu and some
commercial aspects of the Free Software world, which was interesting as usual.
We left Jülich at early afternoon and arrived in Brussels at around 5 PM. I
dropped off Holger at the university and then tried to find the appartment. It
took me some time, but after asking a couple of people on the streets and some
extensive studying of a map in a grocery store, I finally found the guys.
Neal and Barry had organized two connected appartments only a couple of kms
away from the university where FOSDEM takes place. They were really nice and we
had a small kitchen (no oven though), a fridge and a dish washer. There were
almost enough beds available for everybody, I managed to be able to sleep in
one of those.
When I arrived, Sören Schulze (sdschulze), Neal, Marcus, Marco Gerards, Bas
Wijnen (shevek), Barry deFreese, Olaf Buddenhagen, Guillem Jover (braindmg) and
Ognyan Kulev (ogi) were already there (from
left to right, ogi is not on this picture), Jeroen Dekkers (who stayed
elsewhere) and Robert Millan (nyu) joined us later on, as well as Neal's wife
Isabel.
By the time I had unpacked my things, fired up my notebook and read the
remaining mails from that morning, the guys had managed to get an outward ssh
connection on port 53 through the hotel's WLAN, i.e. free internet for the rest
of the weekend...
Neal (with some small help by Barry and me) prepared a very nice dinner and
then we hacked
for the rest of the night. Barry managed to get Marcus to work on shared memory
instead of his slides, and I mostly entertained myself with exploring the
possibilities of starting the
Hurd console on bootup and looking into using sbuild in a chroot, which
turned out to be perfectly usable once you work around a bug in sudo. Totally
exhausted, I went to bed at some point between 4 and 5 AM.
Saturday
Getting up was pretty hard, but breakfast was nice. While the others left for
Richard Stallman's keynote,
Neal, Marcus and I went shopping in a nearby supermarket to provide pick-nick
style lunch for the Hurd developer's room. At about the same time we finally
arrived at devroom, the first people started popping in. It turned out the
FOSDEM program had a different
opinion on our schedule than Neal had, so we had to tell a couple of people
to come back later.
Ogi
kicked off the devroom with his talk
(slides)
about extending ext2fs beyond the legendary 2 GB limit. He explained the
limitations of the old approach and in which way he modified libpager. He also
mentioned his work on ext3fs.
Neal
then gave a charismatic and enthusiastic presentation
(slides)
about the problems of Hurd/Mach and how Hurd/L4 is going to address them. He
was very good at conveying how applications should be given the possibility to
page themselves and how it is impossible for the kernel to guess the right
eviction scheme. He was repeatingly emphasizing his words with his gestures
when he talked about pushing stuff out of the kernel and he kept on smiling
when he explained his reasons and plans.
<racin> neal: your code seemed great at a first glance, but now
that I see your slides, it seems even greater :)
Marcus
was next, he talked
(slides)
about inter-process communication (IPC) in the Hurd/L4 multi-server context,
what different kinds of IPC there will be and what security implications have
been considered for the interaction between untrusted servers. He also compared
Mach's RPC (very (too) featureful, but slow) to L4's (very basic, but extremely
fast) and had some nice
pictures
to get his points across.
Peter de Shrijver (p2) continued by talking
(slides)
about the proposed device driver framework for Hurd/L4. He explained the
differences between different bridges like PCI or USB, how the bridge drivers
would interact with the device drivers and what the interrupt handler would
look like.
Marco
was last and presented
(slides)
GRUB2, the next generation all-purpose operating
system^W^Wboot loader. They seem to have come a long way and it looks like
GRUB2 will be easy to hack on, he cited a couple of code snippets and
interfaces to prove this.
All in all, the devroom was really crowded most of the time and the talks
seemed to be well received by the audience. After the talks, we finally got a
chance to chat with everybody, especially the french (Debian) GNU/Hurd hackers
from the HurdFr organization like Manuel
Menal, Marc Dequènes (Duck), Gaël Le Mignot (kilobug) and Arnaud Fontaine. Some
other people like Yoshinori Okuji (The GNU GRUB maintainer) and Christopher
Bodenstein (Physicman, who is helping with the Debian GNU/Hurd port) were
around as well and we had an ad-hoc keysigning party. I also met Dafydd
Harries for the first time in real life, who shortly visited the Hurd developer
room.
We went home to the appartment, which was a bit more difficult than expected,
because we could not find the official exit of the FOSDEM parking lot and (like
always) just used the entrance. On the way back, Bas voiced his interest in
Debian development and Guillem and me explained the necessary steps to
participate and what one can do until one has an account. Hopefully, this will
mean one more very clueful Debian new maintainer candidate. We only stayed at
the appartment for a short while and then met again with the HurdFr
crowd at a restaurant
nearby to have dinner. I talked a lot to Duck (Marc Dequènes) about Debian, the
Hurd and Ubuntu and also to Ogi about his plans in Debian
development since he has entered
the new maintainer queue. Seems like he wants to maintain his ext3fs work as a
Debian package and might also work on porting debian-installer (he is already
translating it into Bulgarian), which would be great.
After dinner, we went back to the appartment for some night hacking. Marcus and
Barry cooked
up a glibc patch necessary for shared memory support and discussed it with
Roland via mail. I also had some nice discussions with Neal, Marcus and
Guillem about the general direction of Debian's GNU/Hurd port, and contrary to
my previous beliefs they still seem to be interested in the Debian port and
also acknowledge that Hurd/Mach is still very important today until Hurd/L4 is
ready. I spent the rest of the night finalizing the slides for my 'Debian
GNU/Hurd' talk I was supposed to deliver the next morning.
Sunday
Getting up as early as 8:40 AM was even worse than the day before, but with
some luck and tough driving we managed to be only 5 minutes late for my talk.
However, when we arrived in the Debian developers room, there was no beamer
available yet, and I had to start my talk without one. Wouter told me the
beamer should arrive any minute, so I decided to leave my notebook turned off
to still catch the 'Ohh, XFCE4 runs on the
Hurd!' reactions when it would boot up. It turned out that the beamer took
longer to arrive than expected and I quickly ran out of things to say from the
top of my head, so I had to switch on my notebook nevertheless and look at my
slides.
This all resulted in the talk being pretty unorganized, but there were a couple
of questions afterwards and I was moderately happy how it turned out in the
end. (A couple of days later, Wouter popped up on IRC and told me he
reinstalled the Hurd, so there was some immediate success from my talk)
Right after me, Guillem
talked about the porting issues we face and how to prevent them, by not
targetting GNU/Linux but POSIX. As a lot of Debian developers were around, I
hope his talk had helped to open their mind to think beyond GNU/Linux.
I stayed in order to listen to Hanna
Wallach talk about debian-women and Matthew Garrett
discuss the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The devroom was packed during
Hanna's talk and she did a great job in communicating the aims of the
debian-women project to the audience. She also mentioned she recently joined
the Debian New Maintainer process, yay. I first met her two years ago at FOSDEM
together with Matthew and back then was under the impression she was some sort
of BSD hacker too cool for Debian or something, so I was a bit surprised when
she mentioned simply having been too intimidated to start joining Debian. I
guess the public image of the NM process really needs fixing... Matthew's talk
was very interesting but also a bit sad, as the bottom line was that different
parts of the developer body have diametrically opposed opinions on almost all
aspects of the DFSG and consensus on the current DFSG is impossible (and fixing
probably very hard).
After the talks I went back to the info stand with Robert Lemmen (who came in
during my talk) and met the others to have lunch. Unfortunately, we did not find
a suitable restaurant and had to cope with the sandwiches sold at FOSDEM.
Afterwards, we met a couple of Debian-UK guys in the big auditorium and hat some
more ad-hoc keysigning there and then listened to Alan
Cox talk about stable kernel development. The bit about 'Once you fix the
VM for one use case, it breaks for another' part was funny in the light of
Neal's talk the day before, where he identified exactly this as a fundamental
problem and pointed out how to address it by moving the memory management under
the control of the applications themselves. I later listened to the second half
of Thomas Langes' FAI talk and then went back to the appartment with Marcus,
Olaf, Guillem and Ognyan to pack. When we came back, I met Robert again at the
Debian booth and we listened to the second half of the GPL enforcement talk.
After that was over, we realized a lot of people had left already. We could not
find anybody to go out for dinner with and thus decided to drive home early.
We picked up Paul Sladen and a desktop box, both of which the german guys
"forgot" at FOSDEM. I mostly talked to Robert on the way home, he seemed to be
interested in the Hurd, so maybe a new developer is born. We also talked about
other aspects of Free Software, from Debian over Ubuntu to Java stuff. When we
arrived in Frankfurt, it was already pretty late and Paul couldn't reach his
contact in Marburg, so he had to sleep at the same FFII activist Holger slept
three days earlier. I decided to drive all the way to Munich, which was pretty
exhausting and Robert had to tell me lots of different stories to keep me
awake. At some point around Würzburg I suddenly realized we still had Martin's
desktop box in the trunk, but it was already too late to turn back.
Finally, at 4 AM, I was back home from a blast weekend (and recovering ever
since. I met Martin two days later near Nuremberg and handed over his box.)