This was my first big BSD conference. We also planned - planned might be a big word - thought about doing a devsummit on Friday. Since the people who were in charge of that had a change of plans, I was sure it'd go horribly wrong.
The day before the devsummit and still in the wrong country, I mentioned the hours and venue on the wiki, and booked a reservation for a restaurant.
It turns out that everything was totally fine, and since the devsummit was at the conference venue (that was having tutorials that day), they even had signs pointing at the room we were given. Thanks EuroBSDCon conference organizers!
At the devsummit, we spent some time hacking. A few people came with "travel laptops" without access to anything, like Riastradh, so I gave him access to my own laptop. This didn't hold very long and I kinda forgot about it, but for a few moments he had access to a NetBSD source tree and an 8 thread, 16GB RAM machine with which to build things.
We had a short introduction and I suggested we take some pictures, so here's the
ones we got. A few people were concerned about privacy, so they're not pictured.
We had small team to hold the camera 
At the actual conference days, I stayed at the speaker hotel with the other speakers.
I've attempted to make conversation with some visibly FreeBSD/OpenBSD people, but
didn't have plans to talk about anything, so there was a lot of just following
people silently.
Perhaps for the next conference I'll prepare a list of questions to random BSD people
and then very obviously grab a piece of paper and ask, "what was...", read a bit from
it, and say, "your latest kernel panic?", I'm sure it'll be a great conversation
starter.
At the conference itself, was pretty cool to have folks like Kirk McKusick give first person accounts of some past events (Kirk gave a talk about governance at FreeBSD), or the second keynote by Ron Broersma.
My own talk was hastily prepared, it was difficult to bring the topic together into a coherent talk. Nevertheless, I managed to talk about stuff for a while 40 minutes, though usually I skip over so many details that I have trouble putting together a sufficiently long talk.
I mentioned some of my coolest bugs to solve (I should probably make a separate article about some!). A few people asked for the slides after the talk, so I guess it wasn't totally incoherent.
It was really fun to meet some of my favourite NetBSD people. I got to show off my now fairly well working laptop (it took a lot of work by all of us!).
After the conference I came back with a conference cold, and it took a few days to recover from it. Hopefully I didn't infect too many people on the way back.
I gave two talks, one covered userland sanitizers and the other one kernel sanitizers. Unfortunately video recordings from the conference are not available, but I've uploaded my slides online:
- LLVM Sanitizers in the NetBSD userland
- Taking NetBSD kernel bug roast to the next level: Kernel Sanitizers
Besides participating in the conference and preparing for the travel and talks I've been researching the libunwind port to NetBSD and further integration of Lua. The libunwind port from the nongnu project has been approached to passing 22 out of 33 tests and the current blocker is the lack of signal trampoline handling or annotation. A signal trampoline is a special libc function, registered into the kernel, that is used as a helper routine to install and use signal handlers. Backtracing the function call stack is not trivial. We need to either annotate the assembly code in the trampoline with DWARF notes or handle it differently inside an unwinder.
I wrote a toy application using the newly created Lua binding for the curses(3) library. The process of writing the Lua bindings resulted in detecting various bugs in the native curses library. A majority of these bugs have been already fixed with aid of Roy Marples and Rin Okuyama, though they are still waiting for merge. I intend to keep working on the bindings in my spare time, but a shortcoming is that there are a lot of API functions (over 300!), and covering them all is time consuming process.
Meanwhile, I've made progress in the upstreaming of local LLVM patches. I've finally upstreamed to switch of indirect syscall (syscall(2)/__syscall(2)) to direct libc calls.
Plan for the next milestone
I will visit the GSoC Mentor Summit & MeetBSDCa in October (California, the U.S.). In the time besides the conference I will keep upstreaming local LLVM patches (almost 3000LOC to go!).
This work was sponsored by The NetBSD Foundation.
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