OpenBSD Journal

e2k17 Nano hackathon report from Bob Beck

Contributed by pitrh on from the hockey and hackers around a table dept.

While the world largely wasn't looking, there was a nano hackathon last month, Hackathon report - e2k17 Hackathon, Edmonton Alberta. Bob Beck (beck@) writes,

So this was a small "nano" hackathon held a bit under the radar. Unlike the big ones this was not Foundation supported or anything really beyond my Visa card and my Darling Wife's patience ;)

A little background, Mike Larkin (mlarkin@)is a bit of a hockey fan, and had come up to Edmonton last year to see the Oilers play in the old Edmonton Coliseum, during their last season there. We also met up in Calgary last year at Theo's place and hacked for a bit and went to a Flames game. This year, my civic tax dollars having provided much needed support for impoverished NHL team owners, Edmonton has a brand new Downtown Arena at Rogers Place. Mike was interested in coming up to see a game in the new one, and picked the March 28th Edmonton Oilers vs the Los Angeles Kings (mike's team). Philip Guenther (guenther@) decided to tag along from the deepest southern realms of Lord Dampnut, and this was enough to entice Theo (deraadt@) to drive up to the Frozen Wasteland of Edmonton from Calgary. With that, we had a Nano hackathon, I prepared to have house guests, good food, extra coffee, and a table downstairs for hacking.

During the Brisbane hackathon in January it came to Claudio Jeker's (cladio@)'s attention that we were doing this. And he decided to come on over from Zurich, hack, and ski afterwards with a mutual friend.

So for an extended weekend we had 5 hackers in the basement. Philip working on his nefarious system call unlocking plans. Theo and Mike back and forth with vmm and various other improvements, and Claudio and I working on getting relayd switched over to libtls from the bare knuckles OpenSSL API that it is currently implemented in.

Just from my own use, I can say vmm improved a lot, basically, I started using it as some of mikes recent changes filtered in, (which led to some of the things I actually got going).

Claudio did terrible things to relayd, while I worked on getting the least intrusive set of changes to libtls that would be necessary for a staged approach to supporting what relayd needs to do. By the end of the hackathon we had a working diff, and I've now polished up a couple of the needed libtls changes that will go in soon.

On the side I did a little more midlayer work, (with some help from using vmm) and should also have a buffer cache flipper ready for consumption soon.

This extends the work I did in australia a year ago to convert us to two 2q caches (double double) and makes the upper cache use memory above 4GB on amd64.

We had a fantastic Indian dinner cooked by Philip in my kitchen - this fed us for several days.. and I think my wife for lunch for the entire week, with more leftover.

So after a successful watching of sportsing in the new arena to finish things, everyone else headed home, Claudio stayed to ski, and I just got rid of him this morning taking him to the airport for his flight back to Zurich.

Thanks to all who attended

-Bob

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