Benny Siegert

NetBSD may seem like an exotic choice for an operating system. But it is actually a decent desktop OS for developers and a rock-solid server OS, in the cloud as well as on old hardware. Come for the freedom from systemd, stay for the great packages, modern features and enthusiastic community!

In this talk, I will give reasons why adopting NetBSD makes sense, show some cool hardware that you can run NetBSD on, and talk about new features in the upcoming NetBSD 9 release.

There have been a number of exciting developments in NetBSD and pkgsrc in the last year. This talk will give an overview over some cool recent developments, new features and show some exciting hardware to run NetBSD and/or pkgsrc on.

NetBSD 8 has been released, and perhaps there will be a -9 release in time for FOSDEM!

64-bit ARM support is improving quickly. There is exciting new hardware (such as the Pinebook) to use NetBSD on, plus ARM cloud instances on Scaleway and EC2.

pkgsrc has gotten a lot more packages, of course, but there have been other improvements.

pkgsrc (the NetBSD package collection) supports more than a dozen platforms. On a Chromebook in Dev Mode, you can install "arbitrary" Linux software. Obviously, pkgsrc is the perfect fit for that!

However, things are not quite as easy. First, you must get a C compiler, and then there are a lot of idiosyncrasies on the platform. This talk gives an overview of how to get started, and shows the grossest hacks I had to do to get a working pkgsrc setup.

After a quick introduction to pkgsrc (the NetBSD package collection), we will talk about how Go code is built, how Go handles dependencies and what challenges there are in putting the two together. It turns out that the buildlink framework is well applicable to dependencies of Go programs too. Bonus: How to make your Go code easy to package.

Your host will kick off the BSD devroom with a few opening remarks.

Go is a new systems programming language with a focus on concurrency and expressiveness. The Go programming language recently gained support for running on NetBSD on the i386 (386) and x86_64 (amd64) architectures. This support will be part of the upcoming Go 1.1 release. (FreeBSD had already been supported in the Go 1 release).

This talk gives an introduction to Go and presents some of its benefits for systems and network server programming. It will then go further into detail regarding its implementation on NetBSD from the programmer's and from the admin's point of view.

pkgsrc is a collection of over 11,000 packages available for a variety of operating systems, developed by the NetBSD project. Since the end of 2010, there is an ongoing effort to port pkgsrc to MirOS BSD, an operating system derived from OpenBSD. This talk gives a short overview over pkgsrc, comparing its usage and features to MirPorts, the older "native" packages system on MirOS. Compared to MirPorts, pkgsrc has many more and newer packages, a more active community of developers and a very responsive security team that identifies and patches vulnerable packages. Some more practical aspects will also be treated: how to get a new platform supported in pkgsrc (both on the technical and on the administrative side) and which are the principal challenges in doing so.