AsiaBSDCon 2023 Trip Report

The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored my trip to AsiaBSDCon 2023, which took place in Tokyo, Japan. This was my first time attending a BSD conference and also my first time participating as a speaker. I would like to express my gratitude to the FreeBSD Foundation for providing me with a travel grant that made it possible for me to attend.

On the first day of the developer summit, the host, Li-Wen Hsu, discussed the following schedule with attendees. The first session, presented by Brooks Davis, was a talk about the current progress and issues of CheriBSD. CheriBSD is modified from FreeBSD for supporting CHERI, an hardware architecture with focus on security. As I had never heard of CHERI or CheriBSD before, I quickly read through the papers they published to get a basic understanding of the design and the implementation. Knowing the difficulties to build a whole ecosystem from scratch from Brooks' presentation, I was surprised that Brook and their team were able to overcome these obstacles and complete such an amazing project. After lunch, it was my turn to present my work - VT-IME. I introduced the project and demonstrated how to use VT-IME to type CJK characters in the virtual terminal. In addition, I asked opinions about the current design and architecture of VT-IME since I felt this project is relatively too immature to be adapted into the system. Fortunately, many attendees gave me useful feedback from a developer's perspective. I was grateful for their advice and would definitely take it into consideration in my future implementations.

On the next day, En-wei Wu, who also came from Taiwan and was a GSoC participant like me, shared his plans for future work on wtap(4). In brief, he planned to support virtio network device on wtap(4), which lets users be able to test network drivers under different VMs, each of them with different operating systems installed. It sounded so exciting, and I looked forward to this work. Another talk that interested me was "Thoughts about FreeBSD containers", brought by Yan Ka Chiu. He presented "xc", a FreeBSD container runtime that aims to be as full-fledged as the existing tools in linux container ecosystem. My favorite part is how he dealed with the container image with zfs. He pointed out several issues of unionfs, which is adopted by existing tools such as bastile, when achieving the layer concept in the container image, and explained how he leveraged zfs to avoid these issues.

The following two days are conference talks. The talks I listened to were all very interesting and enlightening. Among them, the talk I remembered the most is "bhyve Debug Server Enhancements". The speaker, Bojan Novković, shared his experience on adding more gdb debugging features for the virtual machine such as single-stepping feature and hardware watchpoints. I learned a lot about gdb internals from that talk. I also presented my talk successfully (despite I was a little bit nervous and out of breath at the beginning) and received much feedback from the attendees as well. I still couldn't forget how happy I was when a person told me that he thought my work is quite interesting since he types Japanese in his daily life. Perhaps this is the meaning of being an engineer — to solve existing problems and bring people joy.

During those four days, I had the opportunity to meet BSD enthusiasts from all over the world in person. I had a chance to talk with Yan Ka Chiu and Hiroki Sato about VT-IME, and they gave me much insightful advice. Roller Angel shared with me a lot of his home lab knowledge during the banquet. I also had conversations with Michael Dexter, Chih-Hsin Chang, Wei Hu and many others whose names I didn't get a chance to know. I appreciated everyone who talked with me, and I learned so much from them.

Apart from the technical sessions, I also traveled to many places, including Asakusa (淺草), Ueno (上野), Akihabara (秋葉原) and Shinjuku (新宿). The food, the people, the atmosphere there were all very impressive! I can't even list them all or this article will get too long XD. I also want to thank En-wei for hanging out with me, and I really enjoyed the time we spent in Tokyo together.

In summary, it was one of the most wonderful experience in my life. If I had to choose just one thing I learned, it must be their passion in BSD systems. Their contributions to the BSD community are really admirable, and I hoped to become that kind of person someday :).

Thanks FreeBSD foundation again for sponsoring me to attend the AsiaBSDCon this year. Also thanks to Li-Wen Hsu, who encouraged me to submit a paper to the conference. I hoped to continue attending such events in the future!