FOSDEM 2013

This year, I was given the opportunity to travel to Brussels to attend the best Free Software and Open Source event in Europe, also known as The Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM).

It is one of the biggest open source conferences in Europe; it is a place where the developers of many open projects from around the world come together to have a beer and to talk about their progress. Over 5000 visitors come to Brussels every year to see hundreds of talks organised to dozens of tracks. It was actually my first time at an event this big. And it was great!

The main reason for our trip to Brussels was to present our project called LNST in the Test and Automation Devroom. Unfortunately, due to the travel arrangements, we couldn’t make it to the second day of the conference. Nevertheless it was a great experience. Saturday was crammed with great talks and they all seemed to happen at the same time! Hopefully, the organisers managed to record most of them and will make them available online soon.

Friday’s Beer Event

The conference actually started on February 1st by the beer event in probably the largest pub I have ever seen - the Delirium Café. It had at least 3 floors, all of which were full of geeks including a part of the street in front of the pub. There was a really large variety of beers to chose from with alcohol content going up to (and sometimes probably even over) 10%. I personally liked Belgian beer. It is different from that we are used to in Czech Republic, but in a good way.

Saturday’s Talks

The official event was held at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (or ULB) campus which is situated in southern Brussels. The first talks on Saturday started mostly from 11:00, so there was some time to get yourself together if you had overdone it with the beer the previous day. The first thing we did was actually to get a coffee and a croissant. There was an improvised bar conveniently at the campus, which was really nice.

The first presentation we decided to see was about the architecture and the recent developments of GNU/Hurd from Samuel Thibault in the Microkernels and Component-based OS devroom. Samuel explained that Hurd is designed to provide as much freedom to regular users as possible as the root has (accessing hardware being the notable exception). For example, Hurd allows users to build and use their own TCP/IP stack. Due to the modularity of the kernel, you can replace the majority of the OS without even asking.

Then we decided to move to the Virtualisation track to see a talk about virtual networking. We got there late, and I must admit, that I really didn’t understand the concept. On the other hand, what was really nice were the stands in building K and AW. They were usually overflowing with swag to take (or buy). Red Hat had a Fedora booth there with Jaroslav Řezník and Jiří Eischmann, giving out DVDs with Fedora 18 (apart from other things). I got the opportunity to try the new Firefox OS there. It looked okay, but only one of the four buttons the phone actually worked. I am sure it will do better next year :-).

Željko Filipin talked from 13:30 in the Testing and Automation Devroom about the way Wikipedia is tested, which was really interesting. They use a set of tools called Selenium to automate web browsers. It provides Ruby API to manipulate all the major browsers. This is very helpful during the testing process, as it allows scripting unit and regression tests easily.

My talk about the Linux Network Stack Project was scheduled right after that. I was really nervous about it, because it was my first serious public speaking (and in English). I made it through without passing out, so I guess it went well. Still, I am not sure whether I made everything as clear as I possibly could. The devroom was very well organised (or at least that was the impression I got when I entered) thanks to R. Tyler Croy and others who were running it.

The last two talks I saw there were about the Linux kernel, both were part of the Operating Systems main track. In the first one, Thomas Petazzoni from Free Electrons explained the challenges of ARM support in the kernel and described how Linux deals with supporting different ARM-based SoC’s. The very last talk we attended was from the maintainer of I2C subsystem in the Linux kernel — Wolfgang Sang. Wolfgang was talking about what it takes to be a kernel subsystem maintainer. He explained how a person becomes one and then focused mainly on his own experiences and how he prefers to do it.

Apparently, RMS was there attending the conference, but unfortunately I didn’t see him. $*#.! Well, maybe next time.

Brussels

There was no much time left, but we managed to get a while in the evening to go buy some chocolate and have a look through the city. To me, Brussels is something in the middle between Prague and London. They write everything in two languages - French and Dutch, but they seem to use French a lot more. If you are hungry there, you can get a variety of things from Thai to Spanish, Italian, and Mexican food. If you don’t know, where to go, I can recommend a great tex-mex restaurant called ChiChi’s. As always, you can get a whole lot of junk food from McDonald’s. There are a couple of instances of Starbucks in the city and an infinite number of other cafés to maintain proper caffeine levels :-).

Anyway, it was both a great conference and a really nice trip. I hope, I will be able to come next year as well!