From avg@FreeBSD.org Mon Jul 18 17:53:48 2011 Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2011 17:53:28 From: Andriy Gapon Subject: Re: Mini-summit in Kiev It's my pleasure to report that the mini-DevSummit in Kyiv / Kiev has happened and it has been a success! First, meeting fellow developers in person is always a very nice thing. Then, the talks all were very interesting and useful. In total we had 8 participants from Russia and Ukraine (in alphabetic order): avg, glebius, kib, marck, mav, pluknet, ray, trociny. kib was a main organizing force behind this, ray and his employer, D-Link in Ukraine, has provided a nice place and all technical necessities for the mini-summit. We had the following talks (in chronological order): - /me talked about purpose, design and implementation of smp_rendezvous() mechanism, some issues with it and my ideas on its evolution. The talk has generated a nice discussion with some additional ideas and observations including discovery of one potential bug. - glebius talked about history of CARP in FreeBSD, its OpenBSD legacy and divergence between the two operating systems, how "CARP-ness" should be a property of an address rather than a special interface, and his plans of changing the code in this direction. A nice discussing followed on what would be broken and what would be improved (or even fixed) by such a change. - pluknet gave a short description of a specialized usage of CARP at his $WORK. - lunch, during which a number of lively discussions has occurred and/or continued (the food was Chinese). - mav talked about USB HID in general, potentially complex structure of HID descriptors, duplication between USB HID and Bluetooth HID. Alexander has demonstrated some interesting devices like a touch screen with dual touch and pen+pad with tip pressure sensitivity. He described how he implemented support for those devices in X server. The main topic was how to make ukbd, ums and uhid play nice together and what interface for non-trivial input devices should be provided to userland. It would take too many words to describe the whole talk and accompanying discussion, so some keywords: uhid, uhidd, bthidd, evdev, sysmouse. - kib talked about structure of a modern IGP, its memory sharing and interaction with CPU (on x86), what GEM is, its interaction/integration with OS VM, and the main challenges in his porting of Intel GEM code from Linux. Main topic was the features that had to be added to FreeBSD VM in general and device pager in particular. Fun fact: == ~. - pluknet talked about general compat32 approach, why and where it's needed, and some tough cases like ifioctl where individual ioctls are handled in very diverse fashions. Discussion centered on whether it's worthwhile doing substantial compat32 wrapping or if it's better to break ABI to change data structure to machine independent layout. - ray talked about some issues specific to embedded world, in particular optimizing network routing performance with specialized hardware. - informal part in which, very unfortunately, I couldn't participate. According to kib it was fun, but too short because the formal part took longer than originally planned. Everyone enjoyed this mini-summit so much that we would like to make it annual. Developers from Moscow have expressed a wish to organize a similar summit in their city. P.S. glebius has been taking quite a few pictures, I hope he will share them :) -- Andriy Gapon