A quick update for those folks who were fretting over the discount code expiration. Some helpful sleuthing by dcolish (thanks Dan!) reveals that the Days Inn on Connecticut Ave has plenty of rooms and is actually much cheaper than the Marriott.  It’s conveniently located on the Metro red line, just a couple stops north.

If you book at the Days Inn, getting to the conference is easy.  Walk a few blocks south on Connecticut Ave, enter the Van Ness-UDC station, and go south two stops to the Woodley Park station.  Go up the stairs and there you are!

News hotel

Hopefully everyone that needed a hotel room was able to take advantage of the group discount before it expired on Friday.  The conference is coming together nicely.  All of the speakers and organizers have their travel plans in order; most will be arriving Wednesday, February 4th.

We are tentatively planning for a pre-conference dinner that evening.  Labanese Taverna is right across the street from the Marriott Wardman and has excellent (and inexpensive) Mediterranean food.  Everyone is welcome to join us for this informal gathering of friends, fine food and drinks. More details will be forthcoming.

Conference t-shirts are available for purchase online at Zazzle.  They’re a bit pricier than I would have liked, but that’s typical for Direct-to-Garment printers.  The quality at Zazzle is supposed to be very good, so these shirts should look fabulous.  Our horny t-shirt is specifically designed to ward off GOP lobbyists and wandering penguins.  If you have a special request for a shirt design, add your comment below and we’ll make it happen.

If you haven’t registered yet or have procrastinating friends, make sure to get yours ASAP.  We’re getting close to registration close and they’re steadily vanishing.  Don’t get stuck paying the higher fee on the day of the conference!

News party, registration, shirts

Sounds like a recipe for Witches Brew.  No, the title of this post refers to the last few talks to be announced for DCBSDCon 2009.  We have a lot of stuff to cover today, so I’ll cut to the chase and introduce our last group of speakers.

George Neville-Neil is the other half of the dynamic duo that brought us The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System and that will also be speaking at DCBSDCon.  George will be presenting his talk on FreeBSD’s Hardware Performance Monitoring Counters (HWPMC).

FreeBSD has included support for Hardware Performance Monitoring Counters for several years now.  The hwpmc system provides access to counters that are present in all modern Intel and AMD CPUs, as well as other chipsets, and which give the programmer the ability to understand the low level performance issues that may effect their code.  This talk will cover the motivation behind and basic usage of HWPMC.

I had the pleasure of meeting George in NYC this past year while we attempted to install PC-BSD on my MacBook Pro.  He’s quite a bit of fun and has a great wealth of FreeBSD knowledge.

Robert Luciani comes to us all the way from Sweden.  Robert is studying for his Masters degree in Algorithms and Logic at the University of Chalmers.  He’s been working actively with DragonFly BSD since 2006, and with BSD in general since 2001.  Robert’s research into M:N threading for DragonFly provides us with a unique look at the performance issues affecting SMP.

Ineffective concurrency mechanisms in an operating system can lead to low performance in both single and multiprocessor environments.  Practical setbacks involved with attempting overly invasive kernel changes have made it difficult in the past to implement new and innovative concurrency systems.  This paper describes the rationale behind interfaces in the DragonFly BSD operating system intended to provide high performance and scalability on multiprocessor architectures.  Using a lock-free processor centric approach, DragonFly BSD has developed a unique thread system with the potential for excellent scalability.

Last but not least, I mentioned weeks ago that we would have someone from ShmooCon speak at DCBSDCon.  Each year, organizers of the ShmooCon hacker conference recruit a team of volunteers to design and deploy their secure conference network.  The event is known as ShmooCon Labs.  Ken Caruso has kindly volunteered himself to sneak away for a few minutes this year to give us a short talk about how they utilize BSD in their conference infrastructure.  As a former volunteer from the 2006 ShmooCon Labs, I’m interested to see how their network has expanded in two years to support this year’s 1200 attendees.

This winds up the formal announcements for speakers and talks at DCBSDCon 2009.  Make sure to keep reading the blog as we will continue to have stories and announcements over the coming weeks.  If you missed the earlier post, make sure you make your hotel reservations very soon.  The group discount code expires this Friday!  And of course, don’t forget to register for the conference.

News DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, George Neville-Neil, HWPMC, Ken Caruso, ShmooCon

We’ve been afforded the nice hotel discount at the Marriott thanks to our association with ShmooCon.  If you’re planning on attending DCBSDCon 2009 but haven’t already booked your room, do it soon!  The discount code (details on the registration page) for rooms at the Marriott Wardman ends very soon.  It’s currently planned to expire on January 9, 2009.  We’re working hard to get this extended a bit longer.

News hotel, registration

Today’s entry comes a bit late in the day.  I’ll continue to blame it on holiday festivities until someone calls my bluff.  Speaking of holidays (and eating), our next speaker really likes PIE.  This isn’t your typical pie though;  Position Independent Executables (PIE) are executable binaries made entirely from position-independent code.  Kurt Miller will discuss his work on adding this functionality to OpenBSD.

OpenBSD has randomized the load addresses of shared libraries for many years.  This helps prevent attacks that are described as return-to-libc attacks.  However, programs are linked at fixed addresses which provides some optimizations for executables over shared libs.  When a program is complied and linked to be position independent (e.g. Position Independent Executable/PIE) some of those optimizations are waived for the ability to load the program at a random address.  In this session, I will discuss OpenBSD’s PIE implementation, its impact on existing security mechanisms such as W^X on i386, and the various enhancements needed to the runtime linker, kernel and other system libs.

Kurt presented this talk at NYCBSDCon last year and it was very well received.  Many of us get to take for granted much of his work on features like PIE and as maintainer of the OpenBSD JDK ports.  Come join us for DCBSDCon and buy Kurt a pint in appreciation.  See you there!

News Kurt Miller, OpenBSD, PIE, security