I was a bit nervous when I was taking the flight to Japan. Being in the realm of sleep and conciousness. I was not sure if I could face an international audience when I start my talk on “Portable Hotplugging”.
My initial encounter with the Japanese people were pleasant. They were able to make me feel comfortable and at home, in a place that was roughly 7,000 km from my home.
So after a couple of days of roaming around a bit in Tokyo. Abhinav (abhinav@) and I arrived at the conference venue on the day 1 of talks session. We were provided with a small registration package containing our respective badges and the proceedings of the conference.
My talk was on the second day of talks session. While I was not very particularly interested in the various talks going on, primarly because of my lack of understanding of many of the operating system internals as well as my lack of experience in the field was not helping either. However post lunch on day 1, I was able to meet with the hosts of BSDNow[1] show hosted on youtube, I finally got to meet up with them after seeing them just through a computer monitor for quite a long time.
Meanwhile outside, the Japanese BSD crowd was bringing in all these computer hardware. They included most of stuff like Raspberry Pi boards, BeagleBone boards and things of similar nature. I was not too excited about those. But then I saw they had brought in couple of old and I mean really old PCs that were popular in Japan. These were Omron manufactured “Luna” PCs. I am guessing these were direct competitors to the NEC PC-8801 back in the days. I was always fascinated by old computers, I have always been a sucker for retro computer hardware, just to touch or feel them itself is such a good feeling. And add to this you are looking at hardware that is old and a piece of history. I was really excited to see it boot up. In a way it also reminded me of the first PC I ever owned, which was a HP Vectra 486/33N. As Cryo (cryo@) and I watched the Japanese folks boot up the machines with NetBSD and OpenBSD, I was mentioning to him that my first PC (the Vectra) had only 4 MB of RAM and this Luna 68K has 16 MB and he replied back saying may be if your machine had 8 MB we could boot up NetBSD on it and we both chuckled.
While they were assembling the pieces together, I spent a bit of time with the Japanese folks asking about the hardware specifications of the machines. And I found out that the one of the Luna machines used the same Yamaha sound chip as the Nintendo (yet another Japanese product), the YM2612 chip. I was not sure if they would be able to play music out of it, but the machines were just being loaded with operating systems and the various drivers.
I spend quite sometime inspecting the various hardware they had put around there. They had a lot of old and obscure hardware, some of them I have only seen in tech magazines back in the olden days.
They were also demonstrating some heavy duty routers from Internet Initiative of Japan (IIJ) called SEIL. Interestingly the SEIL routers were running on NetBSD. This caught my attention since I had been looking to run NetBSD on my TP Link WR841ND but had not been successful with this task yet. However seeing the Japanese people running it in their MIPS based SEIL routers gave me hope that one day if I try hard enough, may be I could run NetBSD on the WR841ND.
So on day 2, I was slightly nervous going upfront to give the talk. But I was a bit impatient inside, I wanted to see those Luna machines in action. Once the talk started, words flowed not as smooth as a river but not too restricted either. I managed to finish the talk in roughly 28 minutes, after a round of questions from trouble (philip@freebsd.org) and Todd. I was back outside checking out the now up and running Omron LUNA machines. Todd joined me with a cup of coffee and I told him jokingly that the Luna 68K has 16 MB of RAM so we should be able to run emacs since it has more than eight megabytes and wont swap anymore[2]. The Luna 88K was playing 8-bit music reminding me of the sounds from old 8 bit / 16 bit console (NES, SNES etc) generation.
With my rather amateur attempt to make a collage of the Japanese BSD users group I thought of concluding the post. But I would like to open up a bit more over here. And many veterans of the BSD community (NetBSD / FreeBSD / OpenBSD or any other) might not agree with what I am about to say. So here it goes, I noticed a rather large disconnect between the East and West of the NetBSD community. Different expectations, on either side. To me the Japanese side of the NetBSD community seems to be happy with what they have done with NetBSD, be it building the networking infrastructure backbone of Japan or porting it to run on old and obscure devices that are no longer manufactured, they work with NetBSD because they love it, their passion to code is not defined by the amount of money that was donated to NetBSD or boasting about the various things that they did with it. But the fact that they love their hardware and having the right software brings these hardware to life. The Western half on the other end were concerned about release cycles and the amount of donation that had come into other BSD distributions. The main concern with the Western crowd is to be competitive with respect to other BSD and this was also their main worry about loosing ground to other BSDs, even to the extend that they feel teachbsd[3] course has taken the spotlight off of NetBSD as a “research” / “learning” OS.
My personal opinion on NetBSD is this, it should be what it is. It is loved and respected by hobbyists and tinkers alike, while it is also used for heavy duty stuff by professionals to build SEIL routers. And NetBSD will never fade out, phase out and be forgotten because of the community that plays, nurtures and loves it. It should not matter if quarter of a million dollars in donation came in the other BSDs or even if a guy wearing a “My Little Pony” T-shirt was giving the status report of a BSD while trying to not give a fuck, the truly “I do not have a single flying fuck to give” award goes to the passionate crowd of the BSD Users Group in Japan.
May be in a different timeline or another life, I would love to be tightly involved with the Japanese people that love to tinker around with their hardware. May be some day…
References
- https://www.bsdnow.tv/
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11100420
- http://teachbsd.org/