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/