Berkeley Software Distribution

We are pleased to announce [registration] is now open for BSDCan 2026 and the slate of papers and tutorials are as follows.

BSDCan 2026 Talks:
* Evolving a FreeBSD-Based Chaos Engineering Platform for Teaching – Andreas Kirchner
* Running Stock FreeBSD on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 – Balaje Sankar
* Model Checking in BSD Userland and Kernel – Justin Handville
* Through MAC and Back – Kyle Evans
* Lightning Talks – Graham Percival
* A Two-Step FreeBSD Installer: Current Status and Future Plans – Alfonso Sabato Siciliano
* How FreeBSD 15 Landed – Colin Percival
* Universal Flash Storage on FreeBSD – Jaeyoon Choi
* Supporting hibernate (S4) on FreeBSD – Olivier Certner
* FreeBSD Implementation of the SMT transport protocol – Eugenio Luo
* geomman: Bringing GParted-like Partition Management to FreeBSD – Braulio Rivas Abad
* Getting Extended Error Messages from the FreeBSD Kernel – Marshall Kirk McKusick
* OpenNTPD – 20 years and a few milliseconds later – Henning Brauer
* Return of the Segment: Thread Local Storage – John Baldwin
* Heterogeneous Scheduling on FreeBSD – Minsoo Choo
* NetManager – Building products with NetBSD round 2 – Stephen Borrill
* Bringing memory safety to BSD with CHERI – Brooks Davis
* Don’t Freeze in the Cloud: Reclaiming Home Control with NetBSD – Stefano Marinelli
* What happens when you write to /dev/null – Martin Vahlensieck
* Low friction temporary VMs on FreeBSD – Martin Vahlensieck
* ZFS AnyRAID: Flexible Disk Layout – Allan Jude
* BSD Iterative Infrastructure with ZFS and Zelta: From Battle-Tested Backups to Zero-Cost Iteration – Daniel Bell
* BSD as a Foundational Platform for Nationwide Semiconductor Education in Japan – Hiroki Sato
* pkgbase in Production: A Practical Overview – Lukas Engelhardt
* Migrating from VMWare to FreeBSD bhyve – Sarder Kamal
* Geographically fault-tolerant SSH on OpenBSD – Rob Keizer
* Community Event Organizing – Michael Dexter
* OpenBSD and Temporary Blindness – Sean Howard
* Using Coverity Scan for static code analysis in NetBSD – Emmanuel Nyarko
* How Hard Could It Be? Modernizing XigmaNAS for OpenZFS 2.4.0 – Ken Wong
* “Escaping Plato’s Cave with Software Freedom: A Classical Greek Symposium with Fred – Puffy – and Beastie” – Corey Stephan

Tutorials:

* VPP on FreeBSD Tutorial – Building high capacity networks – Massimiliano Stucchi
* Introduction to TUI Programming using bsddialog – Benedict Reuschling
* Shell Scripting Tutorial for Beginners and Sysadmins – Mathias Eggers
* Build Your Own Secure Private Cloud with FreeBSD – Nils Imhoff
* Network Management with the OpenBSD Packet Filter Toolset – Peter Hansteen

BoFs
* Audio BoF – Michael Williams

Registration is now open! The closing reception, including drinks, is now included for everyone who registers before May 1st 2026. Please be sure to click the box during registration if you’re planning to attend so we can get an accurate count. Vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores will be catered to as we continue to improve conference food offerings.

See you in June!

https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html

Small History.

1 year ago I wanted to replace Windows 7 with some Linux on my parents' old laptop (they don't use it anymore), but failed. I tried Linux Mint, Debian KDE, Manjaro i3, etc., but only Arch Linux and TUI Debian (and custom Windows 11 installer btw) were able to boot.

In September I started using FreeBSD as main OS on my machine, so I decided to try it also on an old laptop yesterday. Except missing kitty terminal in packages, it works really well: no WIFI issues, no video drivers issues, for an old HDD it boots in 1min 30sec for xfce and 1 min for i3wm (for comparason, it takes 1 min to boot light custom Windows 7), I even can dual boot with Windows 7 on MBR disk and finally it can be l up-to-date working machine (in some extent).

P.S. cute community avatar btw. It's hard to find anime+BSD pics.

Did you know that all the BSDCan 2025 videos have now been released? There are two complete playlists for each of the distribution channels: Peertube and Youtube. Thank you to the SDF for hosting Toobnix and giving us a good Peertube home to host the BSDCan videos. 

Peertube - Toobnix, by the good people of sdf.org https://toobnix.org/w/p/7xSAyg6QNPPBM38zkmWPLy

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeF8ZihVdpFe4u2cwVY8GgxjoFICIYyfY

#bsdcan #runbsd

A new BSDCan video has been posted:

Automating My FreeBSD Lab: From Setup to Daily Use with Ansible & Salt by Roller Angel
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 access.

Attendees will see how automation enables:

    Seamless FreeBSD system setup using Ansible.

    Automated configuration management with Salt.

    Effortless scaling to new machines, reducing manual setup to a few commands.

By the end of the talk, attendees will understand how to leverage Ansible and Salt to build a reproducible and maintainable FreeBSD infrastructure.
Intended Audience

    FreeBSD users interested in automating system setup and maintenance.

    System administrators managing multiple FreeBSD machines.

    Anyone curious about Ansible and Salt for FreeBSD automation.

Attendees should have basic FreeBSD knowledge, but no prior experience with automation tools is required.
Outline
1. Introduction (5 min)

    Why automate?

    My FreeBSD lab & laptop setup overview.

2. Building My FreeBSD Lab with Ansible (15 min)

    Bootstrapping a new system.

    Automating system installation & package setup.

    Adding a second laptop with just SSH access.

3. Maintaining & Scaling with Salt (15 min)

    Managing configs, packages, and updates.

    Enforcing system state across multiple machines.

    How I maintain consistency between multiple devices.

4. Lessons Learned & Challenges (5 min)

    Why this method works well for FreeBSD.

    Troubleshooting automation quirks.

5. Q&A (5 min)
What Attendees Will Learn

    How to use Ansible to set up FreeBSD machines quickly.

    How Salt makes long-term configuration management effortless.

    How to automate multiple FreeBSD machines with minimal manual work.

For more information, please visit: 
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/
- and -
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/timetable/timetable-Automating-My-FreeBSD.html

#runbsd #freebsd #ansible

A new BSDCan video has been posted: ZFS Direct IO Benchmarking Pitfalls by Mateusz Piotrowski

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 😴 instead of Zetta). How could it be then that skipping the ARC might improve performance?

During the presentation we will discuss what workloads and setups benefit from direct IO, what its limitations are, and what pitfalls to avoid during benchmarking. We will also look at the implementation to understand how all the promises of stability and compatibility were kept.

Direct IO is reported to deliver amazing performance boosts in some deployments. Understanding how not to hold it wrong is a great first step to potentially unlocking that speed-up on your systems too!

For more information, please visit: https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/

• and - https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/timetable/timetable-ZFS-Direct-IO.html

#zfs #benchmarking #freebsd

A new BSDCan video has been posted:
Effective Bug Reports, Code Change Requests, and Conference Proposals by  Michael Dexter\

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 for:

    Bug reports that are actionable and inspire attention

    Code change requests and reviews that are more likely to review and acceptance

    Conference proposals that stand out, accurately set expectations, and are more likely to be accepted

The secret is that all of that all of these are fundamentally indistinguishable: You are tasked with marketing your idea to others and must show your work, justify your points, demonstrate sincerity, and ultimately convince others of your initiative, regardless of its size.

For more information, please visit: 
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/
- and -
https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/timetable/timetable-Effective-Bug-Reports,.html

#runbsd #freebsd #opensource #unix

A new BSDCan video has been posted: Enhancing Unix Education through Chaos Engineering and Gamification using FreeBSD by Andreas Kirchner, Benedict Reuschling

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 real-world relevance (and were easily solved with the help of AI), leaving students unprepared for professional challenges in their later jobs. To address this, we developed as part of a master's thesis for University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany a new teaching framework leveraging Chaos Engineering and Gamification elements to modernize Unix education on FreeBSD. With our new system, real-world problems can be simulated by instructors and allows students to use system administrator permissions to solve them. We also developed this system to make it difficult for participants to "cheat" using AI and evaluated the system towards that end with a group of students.

This talk will introduce our new "Chaos education system" tested in the "Unix for Software Developers" course at the University. The name stems from the chaos monkey systems that intentionally "wreak havoc" on production systems to improve their resiliency and train the sysadmins managing them to find and fix them. Our approach lets instructors inject intentional faults (error scenarios) into student-managed FreeBSD jails. The students must then identify, resolve, and prevent these issues from occurring again using standard system administration tools, including root permissions. To increase student motivation to solve these scenarios quickly (and to create artificial "production system is at stake" pressure), a global highscore list is used as a gamification element: each time an issue is solved, points are awarded to that team based on the elapsed time and an instructor-defined difficulty bonus. A post-mortem group discussion with the instructor lets students talk through various ways of solving the issue, giving the group deeper insights on possible solutions each group had used. Using the system, the students gain practical skills like troubleshooting, system recovery, and proactive system management with real-world scenarios, something that traditional "one size fits all" assignments lack.

We built the whole system using BSD-licensed open source components: FreeBSD, pf, VNET, bastille jails and templates. Shells scripts act as the glue to tie them together and implement the logic for the rest of the chaos monkey system. The prototype system has been tested with two student groups of 16 students each in January 2025. One group was allowed to use ChatGPT during the scenarios to see how AI-support helps them (if at all). Insights from this testing was used to enhance the system further.

This talk will introduce the chaos education system idea, implementation, demonstrate its functionality, and discuss future work in this area. FreeBSD proved to be an excellent building platform for this system, due to its great modularity, open source, low resource overhead, and available documentation. The system can be enhanced further and used outside of an academic environment, like employee training or workshop-style challenges at events. It is easy for instructors to construct a custom scenario for participants and inject it into the training jails. The system can scale to a number of parallel users due to the lightweight nature that FreeBSD jails provide.

Audience: Educators, trainers, and system administrators interested in modernizing Unix/Linux education through hands-on, interactive methods. Managers may find the system interesting for training their own employees by constructing scenarios mimicking their own environment.

For more information, please visit:  https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/

• and - https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/timetable/timetable-Enhancing-Unix-Education.html

#runbsd #freebsd #pf

A new BSDCan video has been posted: Why (and how) we're migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs by Stefano Marinelli

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 successful. I will provide specific examples and real-life case studies. In an increasingly complex world, relying on simple, stable, and secure solutions is becoming more and more important, and the BSDs can make a significant contribution in this direction.

For more information, please visit:  https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/

• and - https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/timetable/timetable-Why-and-how.html

#runbsd