BSDCan 2025

Contribution List

97. A distributed filesystem for OpenBSD

Development

Lecture 50 min

This talk goes over the development of a distributed filesystem tailored for OpenBSD. While OpenBSD excels in many areas, its native filesystem support has room for improvement. This talk goes into using the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) on OpenBSD to provide for a distributed and highly available filesystem.

This talk also includes an introduction to the Raft Consensus Algorithm, which...

75. A History of the BSD Daemon

Experiences

Lecture 50 min

This talk tells the history of the BSD Daemon. It starts with the first renditions in the 1970s of the daemons that help UNIX systems provide services to users. These early daemons were the inspiration for the well-known daemon created by John Lasseter in the early 1980s that became synonymous with BSD as they adorned the covers of the first three editions of `The Design and Implementation of...

95. A packet's journey through pf

Development

Lecture 50 min

A walkthrough of a packet's journey through (FreeBSD's) pf, concentrating on the big picture and its implications.

We'll cover when packets are inspected, when rules are evaluated and how states are used. Along the way we'll cover what DTrace probes can show us, what some of pfctl's counters mean and just how many times pf can look at a single packet.

This talk is intended for firewall...

110. ABI stability in FreeBSD

Development

Lecture 50 min

The FreeBSD project doesn't guarantee the ABI stability in major version. However, for the minor version, we also not fully guarantee. This cause maintaining a out-of-tree module (at least for Kernel module like VirtualBox) a big problem because module compiles from 14.0 may not able to use at 14.1. This also cause some problem when distributing modules with freshpkg in our base because our...

98. Adventures in porting a Wayland Compositor to NetBSD and OpenBSD

Development

Lecture 50 min

I'm typing this in my Xuake Wayland Compositor on OpenBSD.

I started this journey on the NetBSD 9.99.x branch and ended up having to dig into the guts of wscons, mesa, libdrm, the kernel drm subsystem, the AMDGPU driver and more. I have a couple of very small, but hard fought patches in the NetBSD kernel. It's not over yet, either. I still have a few bugs around the compositor shutdown...

77. An embedded "dev kit" for EndBASIC with NetBSD

Experiences

Lecture 50 min

In this talk, I'd like to present how I took EndBASIC and built a NetBSD-based embedded device that boots into this interpreter in just a few seconds.

EndBASIC is a side project of mine that implements a retro-looking BASIC environment. Up until now, this featured a web interface and a desktop interface -- but I wanted to offer a prebuilt image for the Raspberry Pi that booted...

69. An Introduction to awk: from awk-ward to awesome

SysAdmin

Tutorial half-day

The awk processing language has been around for almost 50 years in the Unix space. All major BSDs include awk in the base system. It allows powerful and flexible processing of text inputs. However, users find it difficult to understand and awk-ward to use, even shying away from using it in the first place.

In this beginner-focused tutorial, we'll get to know the features of awk step by...

94. Approaches to Create FreeBSD Based Commercial Desktop Operating System

Experiences

Lecture 50 min

Abstract—This talk introduces the work to create a commercial desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. Since FreeBSD has a friendly license, it is one of the best options to create an operating system with unique features from scratch. To create such operating systems based on FreeBSD, particularly for commercial desktops, there are two major aspects need be considered: firstly, how to...

92. Automated and Distributed Testing Using TTCN-3

Development

Lecture 50 min

Testing an operating system is not easy. FreeBSD project uses Kyua testing framework and has continuously made efforts to add more test cases. They are mostly written in shell scripts or some lightweight programming languages. Writing and maintaining complex test cases is still challenging.

This talk introduces TTCN-3, Testing and Test Control Notation version 3. This is a...

118. Automating My FreeBSD Lab: From Setup to Daily Use with Ansible & Salt

SysAdmin

Lecture 50 min

Automating My FreeBSD Lab: From Setup to Daily Use with Ansible & Salt

Abstract

Managing multiple FreeBSD machines can be time-consuming, but automation makes it effortless. In this talk, I will demonstrate how I use Ansible to set up my FreeBSD lab and Salt to maintain and scale it across multiple machines—including how I configured a second FreeBSD laptop with just SSH...

86. Confidential Computing with OpenBSD -- The Next Step

Development

Lecture 50 min

Confidential computing is a family of techniques to enhance security
and confidentiality for data in use. One technical approach is strong
isolation for virtual machines.

AMDs Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) offers several feature sets
for isolation of guest virtual machines from an non-trusted host hypervisor
and operating system. These feature sets include memory...

89. Controlled credentials transitions without privileges: mac_do(4), mdo(1) and setcred(2)

Development

Lecture 50 min

In this talk, we will present a project that aims at allowing controlled process
credentials transitions without using setuid executables but instead leveraging
FreeBSD's MAC framework.

Traditional credentials-changing programs, such as sudo(8), have
a non-negligible attack surface as they often include a lot of infrequently used
features and mechanisms that can be dangerous from a...

80. Effective Bug Reports, Code Change Requests, and Conference Proposals

Experiences

Lecture 50 min

Open Source is participatory and BSD Unix is no exception, with its own unique development workflows and events. Bug reporting, code proposing, and event participation are fundamental elements of the BSD Unix community and despite appearances, are open to anyone to participate.

This talk will take a pragmatic tour of effective engagement on these topics with real-world examples and tips...

83. ELF Nightmares: GOTs, PLTs, and Relocations Oh My

Development

Lecture 50 min

Mapping abstract symbol names in source code to concrete addresses at
runtime requires cooperation between the compiler, static linker, and
runtime loader. This talk will talk about some of the practices and
data structures used for this task including ELF relocations, Global
Offset Tables and Procedure Linkage Tables. Depending on time, it may
also cover some more advanced topics such...

73. Employing Economic Data to help make better decisions

Experiences

Lecture 50 min

Much has changed since Feynman complained that "Social science is an example of a science which is not a science... They follow the forms... but they don't get any laws." The social sciences, particularly economics, have made huge strides in being able to provide both the data and analytic tools that can help people make sound, evidence-based decisions about their lives. But not all analysis...

70. Enhancing Unix Education through Chaos Engineering and Gamification using FreeBSD

Experiences

Lecture 50 min

The misuse of AI in education for cheating purposes has created challenges in assessing students' authentic contributions in the last couple of years. Another issue we identified is that University labs rarely teach problem-solving skills for a real-world scenario that students have to deal with in their post-academic working life (i.e. fixing production issues). Traditional assignments lacked...

109. Flipping Bits: Memory Errors in the Machine

Development

Lecture 50 min

We've all heard stories of the dreaded cosmic ray angrily flipping bits in your RAM. But how much does it matter, really? And, more importantly, how do you tell?

This talk will cover an overview of hardware architecture around detecting and correcting memory errors, software support for handling them and other types of hardware errors, and stories of memory errors in the real...

88. Get-to-know-people BoF

Experiences

BOF session

Are you new to the BSD community, or just looking to meet some new people? At this BoF we'll just try to introduce everyone and talk (briefly!) about what they are interested in.

Kind of a human search engine for topics of shared interest.

Come find other people interested in the same thing as you, or new things to be interested in!

85. Hardware-accelerated program tracing on FreeBSD

Development

Lecture 50 min

Hardware-accelerated program tracing on FreeBSD

Hardware tracing facilities are designed to capture various metrics and
information about software execution with a minimal performance overhead,
making them a valuable tool for performance analyses and debugging. FreeBSD
recently gained a new in-kernel framework for hardware-accelerated tracing
technologies (hwt(8) [1]) with support for...

72. I'm a datacenter and managed service provider network engineering manager. AMA.

Experiences

Lecture 50 min

I manage the network engineering team for a Datacenter company to include the Managed Service Provider( MSP ) services. Ideally this would literally be an AMA as I am sure there are many questions the community would like to ask somebody in my position about exactly what we do, why some things are the way they are, and how to work with a MSP network team best.

1) What is an MSP and what...

101. Improvements to FreeBSD KASAN

Development

Lecture 50 min

KASAN is a kernel sanitizer commonly combined with fuzzing techniques to detect memory corruption bugs, some of which could lead to security compromise. Currently, FreeBSD's KASAN can only detect a subset of temporal safety vulnerabilities due to the lack of a delayed freeing mechanism of freed items. Furthermore, the effectiveness of detecting spatial safety vulnerabilities is also limited...

113. IPv6 Tutorial

SysAdmin

Tutorial full-day

This tutorial is for those who have not yet jumped on the IPv6 bandwagon.

The goal is for participants to be able to understand how IPv6 works, how an addressing plan could be built for an enterprise network, and how this can be configured on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

We will also configure services to work on IPv6 and discuss the implications of configuring PF rules for them.

To complete...

76. Migrating BSDCan structure and infrastructure

Adam Thompson

Experiences

Lecture 50 min

When a one-man show wants to retire, how do you keep the lights on?

When that one man worked as much as 30hrs/week for months on end, year after year, to make BSDCan happen, and no-one else is willing or able to do that much, how can the show go on?

The answer: A handful of people who really wanted the show to go on all stepped up to collectively replace Dan.

New roles and...

103. Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset

SysAdmin

Tutorial full-day

The OpenBSD Packet Filter (PF) is at the core of the network management toolset available to professionals working with the BSD family of operating systems.

Understanding the networking toolset is essential to building and maintaining a functional envirionment. The present session will both teach principles and provide opportunity for hands-on operation of the extensive network tools...

71. Networking BOF

SysAdmin

BOF session

A wide ranging conversation about all things network related and the BSDs.

Topics typically include the state of various network stacks, kvetching about the network, switches, routers, and how we are using the BSDs to solve network problems.

66. porch(1): it's not what you expect(1)

Development

Lecture 50 min

In a world ruled by expect(1) and TCL, we discuss an alternative that was developed based on scripting with lua instead. porch(1) was developed with a language already available and used in FreeBSD base in mind, with the aim of TTY testing via pts(4).

The overall aim of this project is to provide a simple subset of expect(1) functionality specifically aimed at developer and sysadmin...

93. Running a root DNS server on FreeBSD -- from Alpha to Now

Experiences

Lecture 50 min

ISC has been proudly using FreeBSD in production for a long time, including to serve critical internet infrastructure with a global user base (including you!), from the DEC Alpha days up till now, mostly on bare-metal.

In this talk I'll go over some of how we (and I) got here, how we've managed far-away installs and upgrades without remote hands during a global pandemic, and how we...

74. Sandbox Your Program Using FreeBSD's Capsicum

Development

Lecture 50 min

With security vulnerabilities [rapidly rising each year][1], program security is more important than ever. One solution to keeping your program from being the victim of the next big CVE is FreeBSD's Capsicum.

Originally developed at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, Capsicum is a lightweight capability and sandbox framework built into the FreeBSD base system. It is designed...

100. Sleep on FreeBSD: A bedtime story about S0ix

Development

Lecture 50 min

One of the main things still missing in FreeBSD for it to be usable on modern laptops is the ability to go to sleep. In the past, this was done using ACPI S3, but newer laptops have removed this in favour of S0ix, leaving FreeBSD without support for suspend on those machines.

This talk aims to get the casual user familiar enough with the terms and concepts behind power management, such that...

68. The NetBSD Packet Filter(NPF)

SysAdmin

Lecture 50 min

One of NetBSD's goal with network security is to upgrade NPF with lots of useful features and then be used as the primary packet filter. In this talk, As NetBSD's current primary maintainer of NPF, I will reveal the improvements I have added to NetBSD's NPF packet filter primarily in relation to Traffic shaping with ALTQ in NPF. I will also reveal Further improvements in relation to...

116. The state of 3d-printing from OpenBSD

Experiences

Lecture 50 min

It's possible to do some 3d printing related things on an OpenBSD machine, but there are a bunch of popular tools that aren't available in the ports tree. We will talk about some of the different classes of software and what things are popular and whether they are currently available on OpenBSD and what the blockers are from getting those into the ports tree.

105. Using Ansible and SSH to manage FreeBSD systems at scale and reproducible

SysAdmin

Tutorial half-day

Configuration management and automation tools, like ansible, can make the life of a system administrator easier both by being able to scale operations as well as help in reproducible create new deployments.
An additional advantage is that the automation will, if done consistently will also document all steps done to create the systems.

In this tutorial attendees will learn how to use...

84. Vox FreeBSD: How sound(4) works

Development

Lecture 50 min

FreeBSD's audio subsystem, sound(4), is one of the fastest out there, but is rather unknown and until recently was largely unmaintained. This talk will go through the various components of sound(4) that make sound possible on FreeBSD, that is:

• The generic driver's structure, control flow and interaction with the device drivers.
• The audio processing chain.
• The user-facing interfaces...

65. Why (and how) we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

Experiences

Lecture 50 min

A few years ago, we decided to migrate many of our servers (and many of those of our clients) from Linux to the BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD - depending on the specific services. In this presentation, I will discuss the reasons behind our decision, the technical and organizational challenges we faced, the tangible benefits we have experienced, and why we believe this migration is...

87. ZFS BoF

SysAdmin

BOF session

Join our panel of ZFS experts over lunch as they field questions from the audience about ZFS, new features, best practices, and everything else related to storage.

If you deploy ZFS, or are considering doing so, you should join us.

108. ZFS Direct IO Benchmarking Pitfalls

SysAdmin

Lecture 50 min

Not too long ago, support for direct IO landed in OpenZFS after years of discussions and reviews. We truly live in the future where we can finally reject complicated caching and fully embrace the unbuffered conversations with our disks. Or can we really?

Those of you who know a bit about ZFS know that the ARC is actually pretty important (without one ZFS would historically stand for zzz 😴...