After I first visited FOSDEM in 2020 (at the time as business trip with IGEL) I decided to go to FOSDEM again this year. This decision was largely driven by the Home Assistant meetup held on Saturday evening.
This post is more of “notes for myself” than really a blog post. About choices wrt. travel and lodging. Though I’ll end it with ~1-3 sentences about each talk I saw life.
Hotel#
I stayed in the Jam Brussels. While the elevator shows the age of the building, otherwise it is an ok deal for the price. Booking direct was cheaper than booking.com. And it cost me 336.48€ for 2 nights including breakfast.
While the location was ok for me, (~30min walk from inner city, ~40min walk to ULB), I’ll look for something closer to either next time.
Being in the middle allows to avoid transport both ways, but isn’t convenient for either. So it makes more sense to get a hotel either close to the center (for attached events/connection for trains) or the university campus.
Travel#
For travel I booked trains both ways. Munich to Brussels. The way towards FOSDEM was 2 ICE, while the return started of with Eurostar to Cologne, and then an overnight ICE to Munich.
Taking a train that arrives at ~10pm in Brussels was not ideal. I missed the “pre-party” of the Home Assistant crowd. When travelling to an event that includes meeting a group, it makes sense to have the evening (maybe including dinner) available.
Going home had 2 issues.
- The train was a bit too far after the event. I sat in Midi for over an hour. I should make sure I actually have minor after plans.
- Over night trains aren’t great for sleeping, if they aren’t sleeper trains. Especially because DB doesn’t do compartment anymore :/
This was the first time I used the Eurostar though. I did not expect to be offered a somewhat real meal. It was similar to planes in terms of presentation and portion. Though I didn’t eat any, since I had dinner to pass the time beforehand.
Eurostar is also quite comfy (in its Premium class at least). Would recommend.
Additional notes: DB’s system being detached breaks any integration with the app when booking multinational trains with German ones. bummer.
Afterthought#
On Tuesday I then realized that I my Eurostar Ticket gave access to the lounge. And I just didn’t know :(
https://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-info/eurostar-experience/travel-classes
FOSDEM#
FOSDEM itself was as I remember. Very busy, way more interesting talks than time. Due to the congestion, some extra time falls victim to staying around / going to rooms early.
Saturday#
Cache me if you can#
This talk was done by the creator of Spegel and introduced the project. He didn’t go too far in depth about how it works, but had some interesting outlook topics. E.g. topology awareness.
State of Checkpoint/Restore in Kubernetes#
This talk was about the CRIU integration with kubernetes. It seems to make good progress. And while they are currently on weird APIs they are working on stabilizing it. It lacked any mention of integration with CNIs to restore networking tasks as well.
Immutable All the Way Down - using System Extensions to ship Kubernetes#
This was mostly about Flatcar. I didn’t quite understand whether it’s actually doing something interesting (overlays) or merging the extensions in mutable fs.
sshproxy: how to load-balance ssh#
I was hoping for something we can use for SSH at work, but we need to do some magic to punch through firewalls, and this was mostly for forwarding in a forward direction.
getaddrinfo sucks, everything else is much worse#
This was largely a rant about different DNS implementations in different OSs. And how every one has something it does well and something it does badly.
Open-Hardware E Ink Devices with Modos: Discussion & Demos#
This was less of a BoF (partially due to room size/style) and more a show and tell. Pretty interesting hardware. I hope they’ll get some traction.
Scheduling HTTP streams#
I mostly tuned out here :( It was quite deeply technical about dependencies and priorities in HTTP. And how they often aren’t used correctly.
Sunday#
A retrospective on Google’s SBOM implementation#
One of the Engs who built the SBOM generation for G3, Android and some other things talking about it. A mix of technical and policy things. Main takeaway: Use build SBOMs since that’s when the best information about components exists.
Lessons learned from integrating SBOM in a supply chain#
More talk about SBOMs and how to properly extract information from the build system.
TuxTape: A Kernel Livepatching Solution#
A quite interesting approach to automate building kpatch files to update running kernels in place. This would allow a quick turnaround from upstream CVE fixing patches being filed to various kernel branches to them being integrated in systems without reboots.
Seems to be in early stages, but quite interesting.
How could open source in vocational education work?#
This was a mix of presentation and question about how to handle open source education in vocational training in Germany.
I think the presentation took up a bit too much time for the intent. But it’s an interesting question. What do we want everyone to learn, and how do we properly teach it?
Ten Years as a Free, Open, and Automated Certificate Authority#
One of the co-founders of Let’s Encrypt gave a key note about 10 years of the project. Starting with the original state of encryption on the web and the goal to get to 100% https within 5 years.
The talk didn’t go into deep technical details, but gave an overview of the resources available to Let’s Encrypt and their ongoing projects. Including soon to come features like 6 day certificate validity.