Usenix, Dallas BOF Descriptions
Mary Seabrook
arrive before now, here is the current status of the
BOFs for USENIX. Please do not hesitate to propose
one which is not listed here, there will be lots of
opportunities to find me at the conference and schedule
one then.
Mary
Prescheduled BIRDS OF A FEATHER SESSION Details
This is a brief description of all of the currently
pre-scheduled BOFs. There are expected to be more
scheduled at the conference and these will be posted on
the BOF noticeboard in the Crystal Foyer.
Tuesday, January 22
8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Malachite Room (lobby level)
The GNU Project (GNU's Not UNIX)
Len Tower, Free Software Foundation
This BOF is to discuss the current technical
status if the GNU Project, to give Project
volunteers a chance to meet those they have
worked with over electronic mail, and to answer
questions. There will be an introduction with
the status of the GNU Project, new programs,
manuals, features, and future plans, with general
information on how to contact the Project and get
involved.
Salon I
UNIX System V, Release 4
Dewey Coffman, Dell Computer
This is scheduled to be a discussion with
developers and interested bystanders of the
merits and pitfalls of porting applications from
Berkeley/SunOS, Xenix, or UNIX System V.3.2. A
sample of the topics includes: Development tools,
C compilers, standards conformance, compatibility
libraries, system calls, filesystem types and
performance, device drivers/ioctls, networking
code, Motif/Xview/X11R4 availability, GNU tools
under V.4.
Salon II
OSF/1.1 and Internationalization
Jan Smith, OSF
OSF has shipped Release 1.0 of the OSF/1
Operating System. This session will include
presentation of OSF/1 Release 1.1 plans, a
summary of key features in the next release of
OSF/1, OSF/1 National Language Support
Architecture, and discussion of OSF/1's present
and planned contents and functionality. There
will be several key OSF developers present to
answer technical (and non-technical) questions.
Wednesday, January 23
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Salon I
Project Athena: Network Services for Thousands of Workstations
Henry Mensch, MIT
MIT's Project Athena has developed several
services to make large (more than 1000
workstations) heterogeneous workstation
environments manageable and useful. These
services have been in use at MIT and around the
world for several years, and the BOF is a forum
for those who currently use Athena software or
are looking for a solution to the problems of a
large workstation environment.
Salon II
Chorus Operating System
Lori Grob, Chorus systemes
Chorus/Mix is a modular Unix running on top of a
small real-time nucleus. The Unix subsystem is
broken up into servers which run in a distributed
fashion and allow dynamic reconfiguration of the
system. There will be a short presentation on
Chorus and then an opportunity to ask questions.
Presenters: Michel Gien, Lori Grob and Jim Lipkis
Salons IV & V
UUNET
Rick Adams, uunet
This is the regular UUNET BOF, and will discuss
various matters and issues related to uunet. It
is expected to start at 6:30 pm, not at 6:00.
8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Salon I
NNTP Managers
Eliot Lear, IntelliGenetics
The outline for this BOF is proposed to be: An
introduction of both the topic and speakers, An
update on the current status including Traffic
levels, volume statistics, Number of newsgroups
and space. Then there will be a discussion of
improvements including NNTP v2.0, interaction
with C News and other innovations. There will be
an opportunity to voice new problems with
attention to the following areas, External
caches, High volume groups and New hierarchies
and then a time for any other issues.
Salon II
POSIX Standards for Multi-Threading
Atri Chatterjee, Sun Microsystems
The POSIX 1003.4a ( "Threads Extension for
Portable Operating Systems", aka pthreads) draft
has been sent to the .4a balloting group
recently. It is intended that this BOF session
serve as a forum for transferring information
from several pthreads committee members present
at the conference to other less involved but
interested conference attendees by way of
presentations/discussions on various aspects of
the pthreads draft, especially those which impact
UNIX evolution.
Presenters: Atri Chatterjee, Devang Shar
Salons IV & V
4.3BSD-Reno Update
Kirk McKusick, CSRG
A summary of the 4.3BSD-Reno release, the latest
release from CSRG. A discussion of the upcoming
4.4BSD release and the announcement of an update
to the Networking release of 1989 which does not
require an AT&T license.
Presenters: Mike Karels, Kirk McKusick, Keith
Bostic
Salon VI
Large Installation Systems Administration
Bjorn Satdeva, /sys/admin inc.
This will be a series of short presentations
followed by discussion time and covering a number
of topics within this area. Anyone with
additional topics to add to the BOF should
contact Bjorn at bj...@sysadmin.com or in person
at the conference.
Salon VII
ULTRIX
Roger Masse, Digital Equipment Corp.
Users or prospective users of Digital Equipment
Corporation's ULTRIX product are invited to
attend an informal information exchange with DEC
people representing the ULTRIX Customer Support
Center, ULTRIX Product Management, ULTRIX
Technical Consultants, and ULTRIX Engineers.
Thursday, January 24
8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Salon I
UNIX Standards
Dominic Dunlop, The Standard Answer Ltd.
A discussion of current standardization activity
within the UNIX community both in the US and the
rest of the world. Standards under discussion
will include, POSIX, C, C++, and networking.
Presenters: Dominic Dunlop, Jeff Haemer
Salon II
AT&T 3B1/7300 Users Group
David Brierley
The BOF is intended as a gathering of owners and
users of the AT&T 3B1/7300 computer. A large
group of us bought the machines and depend on
each other for support. We have gotten together
at the winter USENIX conference for the last two
years and would like to continue our annual
gathering. There is not currently a firm agenda
for the BOF but there will be a group of users
talking about their latest hardware and software
hacks.