OpenBSD Journal

BSDTalk interview with David Gwynne

Contributed by mk/reverse on from the madonna-listening-osx-using-kangaroo-cowboys dept.

David Gwynne was recently interviewed at BSDTalk, covering a lot of topics such as BSDCan and David's flight there, bio, sensors, RAID, USB and David's background for getting into OpenBSD. Check out the interview.

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Comments

  1. By Venture37 (217.22.88.123) venture37 # hotmail com on www.geeklan.co.uk

    Good interview, thanx for the pointers on programming for beginners.

  2. By phessler (64.173.147.26) on

    are there transcripts for these unholy formats? you know, like 'plain/text' or similar.

    Comments

    1. By TheIdiot (216.37.52.133) on

      Here. It's a start. What I had time to do over cereal this morn. Formatting is bad and it's not been peer reviewed. I'll see what I can do tomorrow.

      [Don’t tell anyone I’m freeee…. Don’t tell anyone I’m freeeeee….]

      Will: Hello and welcome to BSDTalk #46. It’s Friday, May 19th, 2006. We just have an interview, so we’ll go straight to it.

      Well today on BSDTalk we’re speaking with David Gwynne, and he is an OpenBSD developer. I want to thank you for coming on to the podcast. This year you were at BSDCan. I unfortunately couldn’t make it. So, I was wondering first if you could answer some general questions about BSDCan: what was the experience like for you, how long were you there, the general attendance, talks, social events, generally how you thought it went…

      David Gwynne: To be honest, my biggest impression of BSDCan was coming through US customs on the way. They held me up and were a bit curious about all the equipment I had in my bag there. Also, the flight was pretty long. Coming from Australia, it was like a 12 hour flight from Tokyo and I’d had about…no sleep by the time I arrived in Canada. But yeah, it was fine. I haven’t really been to many conferences [undecipherable] so I’m not sure how I’m supposed to compare it to other ones.

      W: Did you go to a lot of the social events?

      DG: One or two of them. I mostly hung out with the other OpenBSD developers that were there, and we tend to do our own thing sometimes. But generally we went to the social events.

      W: How would you compare it to the hackathons?

      DG: Extremely different, because at the hackathons it’s more about small discussions where you’re trying to solve a certain problem and you just sit and write code most of the time while BSDCan was very much a passive experience I found. Apart from presenting, it was just sit and listen basically. In between talks it was good to be able to bounce ideas off people and such, but, yeah, it’s a world of difference.

      Comments

      1. By TheIdiot (216.37.52.133) on

        Same disclaimer: Formatting is bad and it's not been peer reviewed. I'll keep hacking at this.

        W: And what did you speak about at BSDCan?

        DG: The talk I did was on sensors and bio in OpenBSD. Sensors are basically just anything environmental about your system and the levels of redundancies that your hardware has. Like if you have three power supplies and one of them goes off line, the sensors framework is there to report it. And bio is about managing your RAID sets. It’s a very basic level of management, but it’s at least some management and doesn’t rely on any vendor tools to do it.

        W: In your opinion, how mature do you think these are?

        DG: The sensors framework has been there since 3.4 or 3.5 and we inherited it via NetBSD. I think grange did the work to bring it in. But, it’s only been in the last six or eight months that we’ve actually really tried to write drivers for it and bring it up to speed. To be honest, it is a bit raw still. It needs a lot of work, and we’re looking at that.

        Bio is totally homegrown. It’s only been around sort of since the last hackathon, and it’s remarkably useable. Yeah, it just works.

        But yeah, sensors needs some work, especially in the userland part. The sensors daemon needs a rewrite basically.

        W: Yeah, one of the issues I’ve had with sensors is it does a wonderful job of listing fans and other things, but I’m not sure which fan is which in the sense of mapping what you get out of sysctl with the actual devices on the board. But I guess that’s a problem no matter what.

        DG: It depends on which hardware you have in your system. On a lot of the desktops and lower end server stuff, they have these very standard chips that can be hooked up in a variety of ways. So people will stick in this really, really dumb chip and hook it up to temperature sensors, and all we know about that chip is that it has four fans on it. So we enumerate them “fan one, “two”, “three”, and “four”.

        But if you go up to the higher end of the spectrum of hardware, into the SCSI realm, you can actually query the hardware for the names of devices. And that’s what we present in the sysctl tree. So, if you look at bsm or ipmi for example, it’ll actually say “baseboard fan 1” or “power supply 2” or something like that.

        We do our best, but at the low end, we can’t tell what it’s physically plugged into so we just say what it is hooked up to, not where it is.

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (82.195.186.223) on

          > But if you go up to the higher end of the spectrum of hardware, into the SCSI realm, you can actually query the hardware for the names of devices. And that’s what we present in the sysctl tree. So, if you look at bsm or ipmi for example, it’ll actually say “baseboard fan 1” or “power supply 2” or something like that.

          It's ``esm'' not ``bsm''.

          Comments

          1. By TheIdiot (216.37.52.133) on

            > > But if you go up to the higher end of the spectrum of hardware, into the SCSI realm, you can actually query the hardware for the names of devices. And that’s what we present in the sysctl tree. So, if you look at bsm or ipmi for example, it’ll actually say “baseboard fan 1” or “power supply 2” or something like that.
            >
            > It's ``esm'' not ``bsm''.

            Drat! I even thought to myself, "that doesn't sound right, I need to check that" as I typed it...then promptly forgot.

            And for the record, I first was going to put things like "sysctl(8)" and "bio(4)" in, assuming DG just wasn't pronouncing the silent man sections. Later changed my mind. Had I done that, I might have caught that there's no "bsm" man page.

            Thanks!

            (...and now it _has_ been peer reviewed...)

            ObStatus: According to my player, I've now made it roughly 1/2 way through the interview. I may have more time to work on it in the next couple of days, so I might get this one done by the end of the week. But I'm not particulalry good at typing _or_ listening, so this is a bad job for me, it turns out. I probably won't be transcribing the BSDTalk archives. (Except maybe the marco@ one...I like Marco.)

            TheIdiot

  3. By Chris (68.230.194.26) on

    I enjoyed it, thanks!

  4. By Bob Beck (68.148.128.240) beck@openbsd.org on

    To use your own words dlg - is there a chance of getting the
    interview posted in a heterosexual format ? :)

    listening to interviews in mp3 format sucks.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.208.173) on

      On the bright side, at least it isn't in some proprietary trash format like Real Media -- set up with layers of obfuscating scripted, streaming, bull shit that make it just "not worth the trouble" of retrieving ...

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (82.75.30.141) on

        > On the bright side, at least it isn't in some proprietary trash format like Real Media -- set up with layers of obfuscating scripted, streaming, bull shit that make it just "not worth the trouble" of retrieving ...
        >
        >

        There are patent issues with mp3, why not use ogg ?

        Ogg is as free as can be.

        Comments

        1. By phessler (209.204.157.100) on

          > > On the bright side, at least it isn't in some proprietary trash format like Real Media -- set up with layers of obfuscating scripted, streaming, bull shit that make it just "not worth the trouble" of retrieving ...
          > >
          > >
          >
          > There are patent issues with mp3, why not use ogg ?
          >
          > Ogg is as free as can be.

          yes, but ogg isn't text. and thats the biggest problem.

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (69.70.207.240) on

            > > > On the bright side, at least it isn't in some proprietary trash format like Real Media -- set up with layers of obfuscating scripted, streaming, bull shit that make it just "not worth the trouble" of retrieving ...
            > > >
            > > >
            > >
            > > There are patent issues with mp3, why not use ogg ?
            > >
            > > Ogg is as free as can be.
            >
            > yes, but ogg isn't text. and thats the biggest problem.

            So why not take the time to write it rather than complain?

            Comments

            1. By tedu (71.139.182.193) on

              > > yes, but ogg isn't text. and thats the biggest problem.
              >
              > So why not take the time to write it rather than complain?

              how am i supposed to write it without listening to it?

              Comments

              2. By Anonymous Coward (69.70.207.240) on

                > > > yes, but ogg isn't text. and thats the biggest problem.
                > >
                > > So why not take the time to write it rather than complain?
                >
                > how am i supposed to write it without listening to it?

                I assume that was a rhetorical question.

              3. By That other BSD guy (213.196.249.220) on

                > > > yes, but ogg isn't text. and thats the biggest problem.
                > >
                > > So why not take the time to write it rather than complain?
                >
                > how am i supposed to write it without listening to it?

                Especially considering the strange accent of some of
                the interviewed people, I want subtitles, like with
                my anime ;)

        2. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

          > There are patent issues with mp3

          only with encoding, not with playback

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (198.175.14.5) on

            > > There are patent issues with mp3
            >
            > only with encoding, not with playback
            >
            >

            not true

            there are royalties on players with exemptions for free software, that's about it

    2. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

      > To use your own words dlg - is there a chance of getting the
      > interview posted in a heterosexual format ? :)

      how do you tell the sexual orientation of a file format ?

      I couldn't find anything in file(1)

      Comments

      1. By Miod Vallat (80.65.224.82) miod@ on

        > how do you tell the sexual orientation of a file format ?
        >
        > I couldn't find anything in file(1)

        When used on some binaries, it will tell you the endianness^Wsex of the file.

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

          > When used on some binaries, it will tell you the endianness^Wsex of the file.

          Hmmm ... my machines at home are big-endian, and my work machines are little-endian.

          I wonder what Sigmund Freud would have made of that ...

          Comments

          1. By Miod Vallat (80.65.224.82) miod@ on

            > > When used on some binaries, it will tell you the endianness^Wsex of the file.
            >
            > Hmmm ... my machines at home are big-endian, and my work machines are little-endian.
            >
            > I wonder what Sigmund Freud would have made of that ...

            The real question being, would Sigmund Freud have used a Mac or a PC?

            Comments

            1. By Martin Reindl (62.178.75.222) martin@ on

              > > > When used on some binaries, it will tell you the endianness^Wsex of the file.
              > >
              > > Hmmm ... my machines at home are big-endian, and my work machines are little-endian.
              > >
              > > I wonder what Sigmund Freud would have made of that ...
              >
              > The real question being, would Sigmund Freud have used a Mac or a PC?

              He used a Zuse Z1 of course.

  5. By cnst (217.12.147.5) on

    *quiet* i could hardly hear the voices on these bsd talks on my laptop. is there a way to listen to these without an amplifier? :)

    Other than that, the talk is quite interesting!

  6. By Michael Knudsen (194.255.47.11) on

    Now that it's been changed (by Daniel), I want to say thanks to Will for letting us use the BSDTalk logo for the stories.

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