This year, I had the great privilege of receiving the FreeBSD Foundation travel grant to attend BSDCan.

The conference informally kicked off with the traditional gathering at the Father & Sons bar near the 90U residence on Tuesday.
The first day of the FreeBSD developer summit opened with Nicholas Carlini’s talk about LLM-driven security analysis in the FreeBSD kernel, setting the tone for the remainder of the first devsummit day. Alpha-Omega’s Michael Winser continued this discussion from an open-source maintainer’s perspective, outlining strategies for dealing with the torrential influx of LLM-reported vulnerabilities.
After a brief lunch break, the summit continued with Vince Milum’s presentation about building a Raspberry Pi-based GPS NTP server appliance using FreeBSD. The overview of his journey in applying FreeBSD to such an unorthodox use case was interesting and highlighted a few rough edges when using FreeBSD in embedded computing.
The summit continued with the Foundation’s yearly overview and an update from the srcmgr team, after which I spent some time catching up with a few colleagues in the hallways.
The first day was capped off by a pizza dinner at the 90U lounge.

The second day of the devsummit began with an overview of the current state of the FreeBSD project’s infrastructure and the ongoing efforts to expand its use of cloud resources. After two “Have/Need/Want” planning sessions, I attended Olivier Certner’s talk about his ongoing work in the scheduler.
The devsummit concluded with a round of shorter talks about planned work in the network stack, extended kernel errors, and virtual memory improvements from Netflix.
The day concluded with a hacking session at the 90U lounge that lasted well into the night.

The first day of the conference began with Sean Howard’s talk about accessibility tooling that allowed them to use OpenBSD while recovering from eye surgery.
Next up was Martin Vahlensieck’s talk about his new tool for creating temporary VMs on FreeBSD.
After a short lunch break, I attended Henning Brauer’s talk about OpenNTPD and its now 20+ years of history.
Following a short break in the quiet room, I attended Colin Percival’s talk about the turbulent FreeBSD 15.0 release process.
The day once again concluded in the hacker lounge, where I also spent some time talking to Mark Johnston and John Baldwin about our ongoing srcmgr activities.

The final day of the conference began with Allan Jude’s talk about the recently introduced ZFS AnyRAID feature.
Next up was Olivier Certner’s talk about the ongoing work to support hibernation on FreeBSD.
The talk explored the implementation details in a lot of depth, and I was particularly astonished by the amount of groundwork needed to add proper hibernate support in the kernel.
After lunch, I attended John Baldwin’s talk on thread-local storage. Another one of John’s fantastic ELF-related talks, it went into the gory details,
behind TLS support in various parts of FreeBSD.
The penultimate talk of the day was another by Martin Vahlensieck, this time dealing with a deep dive into a seemingly trivial operation – writing to /dev/null.
The talk was put together exceptionally well and did a great job of presenting complicated operating system concepts to a varied audience of users and developers.
The last talk of the day was Jaeyoon Choi’s talk about adding Universal Flash Storage support to FreeBSD, after which we slowly started heading to the closing reception.

Attending this year’s BSDCan provided me with plenty of new project ideas for the near future and reinvigorated my drive to contribute to the project.
Once again, thank you to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my attendance this year.