Wednesday, September 10, 2003

9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.

Opening Remarks, Awards, Keynote Keynote: Computing Fallacies (or, What Is the World Coming To?) Michi Henning, Chief Scientist, ZeroC, Inc. This talk presents a look at the software industry and the practices that are rampant therein, muses about the utility (or otherwise) of current-generation computer systems, and challenges some of the so-called "accepted wisdom" that is passed down from generation to generation of engineers. Currently, creation of software is not an engineering discipline but akin to alchemy; this talk presents some of the problems the industry will have to solve in order to be taken seriously (and suggests to abandon the search for the Philosopher's Stone of software engineering).

10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break

11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Sticky Problems Session Chair: Donn Seeley, Wind River Systems Reasoning about SMP in FreeBSD Jeffrey Hsu, The FreeBSD Project devd—A Device Configuration Daemon M. Warner Losh, Timing Solutions, Inc. ULE: A Modern Scheduler for FreeBSD Jeff Roberson, The FreeBSD Project

12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)

2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.

Release Engineering Session Chair: Gregory Sutter, Daemon News An Automated Binary Security Update System for FreeBSD Colin Percival, Computing Lab, Oxford University Building a High-performance Computing Cluster Using FreeBSD Brooks Davis, Michael AuYeung, Gary Green, and Craig Lee, The Aerospace Corporation build.sh: Cross-building NetBSD Luke Mewburn and Matthew Green, The NetBSD Foundation

3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break

4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m.

Invited Talk: Long Range 802.11 WANs Tim Pozar and Matt Peterson, Co-Founders of BARWN Just a couple of years ago, providing a metropolitan sized wireless network would have cost somewhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. The commodization of licensed-exempt radios and the employment of open-source OSs such as FreeBSD has driven down the cost to one hundredth of this. This presentation will cover the design and deployment of a long distance multiple county-wide public wireless network based on 802.11 and other licensed exempt technology. The co-founders of the Bay Area Research Wireless Network will discuss the problems such as the physics of radio propagation, the limits of the 802.11 protocol, hardening equipment for outdoor deployment, scaling use, authentication, and shared use with users of different priorities.

6:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m.   Reception

8:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m.

BSD Status Reports Session Chair: Marshall Kirk McKusick, Author and Consultant NetBSD: Luke Mewburn OpenBSD: Todd C. Miller FreeBSD: Robert Watson Apple: Ernest Prabhakar This session will begin with a short status report from each of the BSD projects. Following these presentations, the audience will be invited to lob questions to the speakers. The entire melee will be orchestrated by longtime BSD referee Kirk McKusick.

Thursday, September 11, 2003

9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.

Storage/Crypto Session Chair: Robert Watson, NAI Labs, FreeBSD Project GBDE—GEOM Based Disk Encryption Poul-Henning Kamp, The FreeBSD Project Awarded Best Paper! Cryptographic Device Support for FreeBSD Samuel J. Leffler, Errno Consulting Enhancements to the Fast Filesystem to Support Multi-Terabyte Storage Systems Marshall Kirk McKusick, Author and Consultant

10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break

11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Invited Talk: Social and Technical Implications of Nonproprietary Software Peter G. Neumann, Principal Scientist, Computer Science Laboratory, SRI International The potential future is enormous for what I tend to call open-box software—simultaneously both revolutionary and evolutionary. However, greater attention must be devoted to security, reliability, and perspicuous interfaces for users and admins alike. This suggests a need for disciplined software engineering approaches that transcend what is conventionally done by developers of proprietary source code. This talk will consider some of the potential risks of not fulfilling this need.

12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Conference Luncheon

2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.

System Building Session Chair: Michael Lucas, FreeBSD Documentation Project Awarded Best Student Paper! Running BSD Kernels as User Processes by Partial Emulation and Rewriting of Machine Instructions Hideki Eiraku and Yasushi Shinjo, University of Tsukuba A Digital Preservation Network Appliance Based on OpenBSD David S. H. Rosenthal, Stanford University Libraries Using FreeBSD to Render Realtime Localized Audio and Video John H. Baldwin, The Weather Channel

3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break

4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m.

Work in Progess Reports (WiPs) Session Chair: Michael Lucas, FreeBSD Documentation Project WiPs should be 8-10 minutes in length, and of technical interest to the BSD Community. Please submit a title, a brief abstract of what the talk is about, and a contact email address for the speaker to: bsdconwips@usenix.org.

Friday, September 12, 2003

9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.

Networking Session Chair: Kostas Magoutis, Harvard University Tagging Data in the Network Stack: mbuf_tags Angelos D. Keromytis, Columbia University Fast IPSec: A High-Performance IPsec Implementation Samuel J. Leffler, Errno Consulting The WHBA Project: Experiences "deeply embedding" NetBSD Jason R. Thorpe and Allen K. Briggs, Wasabi Systems, Inc.

10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break

11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Closing Session Session Chair: Gregory Shapiro, Sendmail, Inc. Invited Talk: Post-Digital Possibilities Michael Hawley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Most of the major expressive media—drawing, writing, music-making, cinema, and still photography—have been pretty thoroughly digitized. Recent themes, like embedding intelligence and communications in toys, appliances, clothes, and buildings, have gained practicality. Big areas, like biotech and ecology, are more in our future than our past. This session looks at some recent cool systems stuff and does a little crystal ball gazing.