When they announced the venue for EuroBSDCon 2009 I was pretty excited to hear that it was going to be held in Cambridge, just a few minutes down the road from where I work. I was even more excited however when I heard that Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick was going to be giving a 1 day tutorial on the inner workings of the FreeBSD kernel!

I have been working with FreeBSD for well over 12 years now and have read many a book on the subject, including a few written by Kirk McKusick, one of which was the subject of this tutorial ‘The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System’. It’s been a while since I last read the book and as FreeBSD is so reliable I have yet to find an itch within the Kernel that has not been scratched by some other developer.
That does not mean that I am not curious about the inner workings, after all if you do not fully understand something how can you maximise it’s potential.

Justifying the spend in the current economic climate was difficult, but there was no way I was going to miss the tutorial even at the expense of missing the weekend talks which I later found out contained another session by Kirk on SuperPages in FreeBSD 8.0.

The tutorial and conference were being held at Robinson College, not too far from the centre and a peaceful walk past the playing fields. Upon arriving I was surprised to see so many beastie T-shirts and many famous faces from the world of Unix!

The tutorial was one of 3 being given that day and saw around 20 delegates squeeze into the Music Room, a small yet comfortable room with brick walls and a couple of oil paintings, one of which had what looked like a tiny Beastie painted in a field (check out the photo)….weird huh….

The tutorial began with an explanation that the course had been condensed over time due to the request of conference organisers and was usually taught over several 1hr 30 sessions. This was the first attempt at squeezing the content into a 1 day tutorial and so might be a little unpredictable.

Having read the book previously I could immediately relate to the slides, and as Kirk continued to enlighten us with his graphical view into the Kernel, many areas of the book that I had read but not necessarily understood, slowly began to make sense. In fact after the first session it became apparent that I had a better idea of how the Kernel worked than I first imagined.

The first section flew by real fast and I got the impression that Kirk might have been regretting the decision to allow questions to be thrown throughout the tutorial. For the delegates however this freeflow questioning was priceless as it was clear that there were a few who had come into the tutorial with no prior knowledge of how Unix/Linux Kernels operate. Even for the initiated, just being able to ask a question and get a detailed response was worth the tutorial fee.

After a brief coffee break it was full speed ahead for next hour or so until lunch, which was surprisingly tasty, and managed to curb the headache I was feeling, along with other cold-like symptoms I had been fighting. Back at the Music Room Randall Stewart popped in to say hello and joke about his session on SCTP where he was having to throw questions out to the delegates to keep them awake (I’m sure it was a joke!)

As everyone returned from lunch, Kirk explained that we had only managed to cover 1 out of 4 of the sessions and asked if we would like to vote for which of the remaining 3 sessions to focus on. All 3 sessions got equal votes, so it was decided that questions be kept to a minimum and Kirk would talk less but still cover all the topics.
By the time we got around to the next coffee break we were back on track and ready for a sprint through Networking and IPC. Speaking of networking, Eric Allman (Sendmail – get it ) dropped in, just in time for the tutorial to finish, and with only 1 minute left for questions!

After the tutorial we were all invited to join the developers for a punt along the river cam joined by food and beer in town, but as I my head was throbbing, I decided to give that a miss on this occasion and head home in search of a dark room to browse the FreeBSD source – or just some sleep.

The tutorial was excellent and if you happen to be curious about the inner workings of FreeBSD, or like me had read the book but needed some more clarity, you should try to catch the next one or buy the course on DVD and learn at your own leisure!

A big shout out to Kirk and all those who made EuroBSDCon happen! Thanks folks!!