MeetBSD California 2014 Recap

I am returning from MeetBSD in San Jose, California.  This isn't a Python-related post per se, but the BSD family of operating systems maintains packages and ports for Python and Python third party libraries, and use of Python on these systems is significant both in the open source development and commercial spheres.

The structure of the conference is a brief weekend unconference.  Nonetheless some of the talks were more than worthy of a full fledged mega-con, and the rest were quality.  It was a good deal.

Venue:  the conference was held at Western Digital.   WD sells a variety of hardware.  The product they were pushing was a several terabyte little box that updates wirelessly (but not by Bluetooth).

We met in a rectangular conference room.  All of Silicon Valley seems to me to be an endless office park with nice weather and some landscaped spots (I've included the obligatory Strelizia/bird of paradise pic from the conference hotel entrance below).  It was a fairly intimate setting.  The food (a variety of sandwiches) was good.  We were warned ahead of time that Wifi was limited; I brought my own Verizon jetpack unit so it wasn't an issue for me.

Talks (that I attended):

1) Rick Reed, “WhatsApp: Half a billion unsuspecting FreeBSD users” - Erlang and FreeBSD at WhatsApp used for scaling.  Now 600,000 users.  It was a good talk, but I wasn't awake and some of it went over my head.

2) Jordan Hubbard, “FreeBSD: The Next 10 Years” Good talk; I hated it :-(

Hubbard's leaving Apple a couple years ago and signing on with iXSystems (a sponsor and essentially the organizer of this conference) made a big splash.  He is an accomplished dev and a good guy by all accounts.  His ideas are on many levels very valid in every sense.

I am primarily an OpenBSD user.  I run FreeBSD on my RPi and on a spare laptop for easy access to Java.  The two OS's have similar philosophies in some respects (correctness, BSD license, etc.).  There is cross-polination when it comes to operating system components, apps, and drivers.  But where OpenBSD unapologetically maintains new releases for older hardware and uncompromisingly adheres to its leader's approach to security and development, FreeBSD in the framework of Hubbard's talk is looking more towards the future and making changes to attract younger talented core committers and target more modern (read mobile) platforms.  Telemetry, scrapping development on older platforms "ruthlessly," getting younger devs involved by providing work that's interesting to them - all this stuff is important for FreeBSD going forward.  At one point he even <gasp> suggested systemd as a good strategy for Linux that FreeBSD should, at least in principle if not in form, emulate.

FreeBSD is everywhere - or at least in a lot of places companies just don't make a big deal of.  Inside cable (connections) was the one example.  In order to accomodate mobile and embedded environments, the OS, although well suited to these platforms now, needs to change.

A lot of this in my mind goes against OpenBSD's philosophy - purity and security at all costs.  My personal philosophy lies with the OpenBSD approach, but I may well be wrong.  Hubbard is a guy with a lot of industry know how and experience and I am a geologist who uses OpenBSD.  He is probably right, but I don't want my fun to stop, so I'm sticking with OpenBSD even if death awaits us . . .

3) David Maxwell, "The Unix command pipeline - using Unix in the renewable energy era"

I always liked Maxwell.  He's a Canadian guy and a NetBSD devotee.

His talk was about a command line app he's putting together for better tracking piped commands on the UNIX command line and reproducing, referencing, and inspecting them retroactively in a way that's easier than what you have to do now.  I think it's got potential and would like to see it succeed.

After the angst I felt over Hubbard's talk, this was a welcome relief.  The UNIX command line is something everyone, or most everyone at the con knows and loves.  Everyone uses piped commands.  This is a useful approach to a common problem - that's something we can all agree on.  My favorite talk of the conference (that I attended).


4) Alex Rosenberg, "Meet PlayStation 4"

By far and away the coolest talk.  Rosenberg presented this well and spoke honestly and as openly as he could as a member of a big commercial project about specifics.  Games require so much optimization at such a low level.  Although this theme came up in a number of the talks, on the PlayStation project it's critical.  Essentially, the best hardware and hardware architecture for the project is selected for a given product lifecycle (10 years?  IIRC) then you hammer at it with software modifications to get every last bit of efficiency out of it.

It's not like there's a standard laptop install of FreeBSD on PlayStation 4 and you let it rip with your happy traditional UNIX OS. They're optimizing LLVM and clang (the compiler and linkers), talking directly to the metal as much as possible, and just generally nailing performance at the lowest level of the architecture (after they've gotten the low hanging fruit up top, of course).

Another theme that came up in almost all the talks, but especially in this one, was the BSD license.  Granted, it was a BSD conference, so organizers and attendees have a bias.  Nonetheless, it appears that licensing is really critical in the decision to adopt open source software and operating systems.  "business friendly" nowadays often has "capitalism at its worst" overtones, still, it was a theme:  the BSD license is the "business friendly" one whereas the GPL, particularly the GPL3, is not . . .

I'm not a gamer, but I enjoyed this.  Rosenberg is really easy to talk to as well.  He let me take that pic up close when we were posing for the group pic after his talk.

5) Brendan Gregg, "Performance Analysis"

Gregg works for Netflix.  He's written a lot of dtrace scripts (including numerous Python ones) and has them readily available on Github.

I found myself wishing I knew more about the subject, because performance monitoring is a really cool netadmin problem when, like Netflix, you're dealing with huge bandwidth challenges (as in other talks, so much comes down to optimization).

That said, Gregg presented some graphical tools that are useful (I'll get the names wrong, so I won't try) - basically histogram-like, color coded performance charts with labels for processes.  You don't have to run your own netflix to benefit from these and he's made everything open source and available.  If I were a netadmin I would jump on this.  I've got to get smarter first before I can benefit from these tools.

Gregg has a soft British accent and a very amiable demeanor.  He was the first talk in the morning.  It was like a lullabye.  This is one I need to revisit on the videos posted online because it's worth it.


6) Corey Vixie, "Web Apps on Embedded BSD..."

The iXSystems surprise talk, but a good one.  The youngster Vixie briefed us a bit on what iXSystems is doing with web presentation layer (for lack of a better description) of the FreeNAS implementation.

He started off by saying static web pages are, at least for apps like FreeNAS, not the way to go anymore.  Refreshing the DOM (Document Object Model) at regular intervals is not going to work well.  He then introduced us to a number of mature and nascent JavaScript/web technologies, some of which no one in the room had yet heard of.  Basically he had to rewrite the "old" Django/other technologies implementation to accomodate better simulation of a desktop app in the browser.

The specifics were not something I could follow well because of my ignorance.  There was talk of an Open Source, BSD licensed Facebook framework whose name I can't recall, a one-way change propagation architecture for updating the dynamic web page, and, as always, optimization of the process.  I asked him about Django after the talk.  He said it was the best thing a couple years ago for this app, but now they needed something that could interact directly with the browser - namely JavaScript - it comes down to fine-grained control and optimization.

One humorous interlude during the Q & A was my asking him if he was indeed related to Paul Vixie, historical UNIX tools author (Vixie Cron), to which he replied, "This is the part of my talk where I say, 'I am Worf, son of Mogh.'"  Anyone with a sense of humor and a knowledge of STTNG can't be all bad ;-)

A few people pics:

Dru Lavigne.  Without the BSDA cert program she helped found, I would never have gotten over the hump learning UNIX.  We differ on our choice of specific BSD, but I still consider her my UNIX mentor.

iXSystems old timers Denise and Matt working out conference specifics.

FreeBSD Foundation rep Anne.

Conclusion:  MeetBSD is an affordable, pretty meaty con if you like UNIX, hardware, and topics about optimization and scale.  It is, fortunately or unfortunately, a pretty well kept secret.

Thanks for stopping by.