BSDcan 2007

I had an absolute blast at BSDcan 2007.

There's more buzz this year about embedding FreeBSD than there has been in prior years. I believe that we're building momentum in this space.

There were a number of cool talks about developments in FreeBSD, which you can see at the bsdcan web site.

My talk on SD/MMC cards was well recieved. The slides are available now. This contains an overview of the various flavors of SD/MMC card.

My talk on the Atmel AT91RM9200 slides are also available, as are my 2000 talk on NEWCARD as a paper or as MagicPoint slides, and the follow on paper on ISA vs PCI interrupt dispatch in the PC Card code I gave in 2002.

I've had a chance to also hack on the cardbus resource allocation code a bit while here. There's still something screwy going on with it, but I'm having trouble locating the oddness.

I had hoped to collect some of the older SD/MMC cards while at this conference. However, nobody had any cards that I was able to take with me. I did have a few of them that I was able to try out on my Atmel AT91RM9200 board and fix minor timing issues with the stack (the older ones are a little slower and needed slightly longer timeouts).

The best part is seeing everybody again from past years. It is good to see the community growing. It is also good to see many people form companies that have been designing in FreeBSD into their products for years. These companies have also started to fund the chances necessary for them to run FreeBSD in different embedded platforms (both i386 based, as well as powerpc and mips based hardware was talked about).

There's also been some buzz about creating a FreeBSD community summit to complement the FreeBSD developers summit. A place where developers, engineers from companies using the products and users could get together and discuss how to drive FreeBSD development as well as ways to facilitate integration of changes that companies have developed for FreeBSD that they desire to give back to the FreeBSD project.

It was also good to see developers from the sister BSD projects. Renewing the personal ties to the people in these sister projects is good for the BSD ecosystem, and we need to do more of them.

That's all for now. I hope to post links to videos from my talks shortly (or find some way to put them on you tube, if they are short enough).

see everybody next year!

All in all, a very exciting BSDcan.