EuroBSDCon 2026 in Brussels, Belgium: travel notes after the conference

I am back from EuroBSDCon and finished going through my inbox... It is time to write a blog post and share my experience!

Brussels was great, EuroBSDCon was great and I miss it! Apart from a very nice NetBSD Summit and very good talks, EuroBSDCon for me is that time of the year to meet again in person with the BSD community and also meet new folks.

Thursday 10, 2026: arriving in Brussels, Belgium

Traveling to Brussels by train was a bit long, so this time I have decided to take trains to Milan and then get a flight from LIN airport to BRU airport.

I had the flight from LIN at 9:25 and arrived at BRU at 11:00. Once in BRU airport, I went downstairs to the train stations. I got a ticket to Etterbeek and then tried to find the first train that got me there. After figuring out the train that brought me there and waiting a bit, I took an S19 train. On the train I sat near a couple with two little dogs. They spoke French, so they were likely locals. There was a girl who asked them how many stops were Bordet. They replied: «Premier arrêt». Looking at her face, she was a bit confused. I don't know French, but because of the assonance with Italian, that seemed to me the first stop. I have double-checked the S19 route and then I said «First stop»! When the train departed the ma'am talked to their dogs... I said to myself, hey! I know this dog language and I smiled. She was talking to her dogs in Italian! However, with each other they spoke in French and I thought maybe only she and their dogs knew Italian. The girl got off at Bordet. The train was mostly empty, then they started to talk to each other in Italian with some slang from the South, probably Apulia one. After a couple of stops I am near Etterbeek. I look at the couple and say to them «Buon ritorno e proseguimento» («Safe travels and have a nice day») and they said «Grazie, anche a te» and all of us smiled (and probably dogs were wagging their tails as well! :)).

Visit to Cantillon Brewery & Museum

It was sunny and that was also a good excuse to sightsee the city, so I decided to go to the hotel on foot. After less than 30 minutes, I was in the hotel. I left my luggage and walked around to grab some food. I stopped at the nearest bakery that I found and got a baguette and started eating it while walking. I did not have any clear plans, but before going to Brussels I had asked the brewmaster of my favorite brewery if he had any suggestions. He suggested visiting Cantillon Brewery & Museum. Cantillon is a brewery with some of the oldest brewing equipment. Included in the tour were also 3 tastings and I had a traditional lambic, a lambic gueuze and a lambic kriek. Given that I needed to return to my hotel and it was not that late, I also decided to have another (bigger) beer, a lambic fruit. During the tour I met other visitors, in particular two families from the USA. I was going to say bye, but when doing that they invited me to stop at their table and offered another lambic. They were visiting several countries in Europe and they also stopped in Rome, so I've shared some restaurants and pub suggestions there. :)

Non-lambic beers time with other NetBSD developers and dinner

I went back to the hotel and there Christoph Badura (<bad>) was waiting for me! I was very happy to meet Christoph again. Our last adventure was in Munich, Germany, for Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit (I also blogged about it in Google Summer of Code 2025 Mentor Summit in Munich, Germany: travel notes). Unlike me, Christoph was more familiar with Brussels, so I asked if he knew some places to go or if he trusted me with some (other) beer places that I wanted to visit. He was okay with the beer places and we went to Moeder Lambic Original. The pub had a vast on-tap selection and a billboard completely dedicated to lambic. I decided to go with non-lambic beers that time. Christoph also ordered some cheese to share and then other NetBSD developers joined us: Stephen (<sborrill>), Adrian (<ast>), Harold (<hgutch>) and Alex (<alsns>).

For dinner we booked a table at Olive Restaurant, a Palestinian restaurant. I love Middle Eastern cuisine, but I was mostly familiar with the Lebanese one. The food was great! We shared several appetizers and I got a lovely hummus fattah.

After dinner, some of us stopped for another last beer and then we went back to our hotels.

Friday 11, 2026: NetBSD Summit

On Friday we had the NetBSD Summit. I walked to the VUB Main Campus in Etterbeek, the conference venue and arrived a bit earlier in order to take my badge and discuss a bit with folks before the start of the summit.

I encountered Stefano Marinelli and we talked about littleFedi, NetBSD and why during these times it is more and more important to have software that can runs on old hardware.

I went downstairs, where the 3 conference rooms where. The NetBSD Summit was in room D.0.07, pretty big room! Harold (<hgutch>) was already there, welcoming attendees and testing his setup... His talk involved two different laptops, a dedicated wifi access point (of course running NetBSD!) and some interesting hardware... But I will share more about it later! :)

Harold welcomed us all to the NetBSD summit and then we started with talks/demo.

Google Summer of Code: introduction, quick report of 2026 projects and more™! - Leonardo Taccari (<leot>)

I try to always share something new during NetBSD devsummits. This time my talk was an introduction, report and experience of Google Summer of Code.

I participated in Google Summer of Code as a student nearly a decade ago and since then I have first been a mentor and nowadays I am an admin and mentor for The NetBSD Foundation.

My talk was divided into several parts:

• Introduction, so anyone possibly new to Google Summer of Code can understand the program and its objectives
• Report of 2026 projects, this year we have 5 projects, I have shared more about them and pointed out possible further reports written by our contributors
• More, tips and experiences for contributors and mentors

Since last year, we have been paying much more attention so that contributors can collaborate with each other. We organize regular meetings where all the contributors and mentors are invited and they share updates, progress and ask any questions.

File system snapshots fss(4) and more - Taylor R Campbell (<riastradh>)

Taylor R. Campbell (<riastradh>) shared about file system snapshots, in particular how fss(4) works and can be used.

During the last months, Riastradh also reviewed and rewrote to make it much clearer and more readable the How to use file system snapshots in NetBSD wiki page.

He also demoed live how to take snapshots and deleted /lib/libc.so.12 live on his laptop and how to recover from such mistakes by accessing previous snapshots and just tar(1) it to recover libc.so.

Version Control System (VCS) migration - Taylor R Campbell (<riastradh>)

Riastradh also updated us about the VCS migration from CVS to Mercurial and Git (yes, both of them will be possible to use, choose your favourite!).

It should be ready soon! A tricky part that he is working on is the CVS vendor branch migration. The vendor branches are used to track third-party external sources in NetBSD and also preserving such information would be nice for the VCS history.

Using jj for version control - Benny Siegert (<bsiegert>)

Benny Siegert (<bsiegert>) introduced and gave a great hands-on tutorial on Jujutsu.

Jujutsu is a version control system designed to be easy to use. Unlike most other version control systems, the user interface and version control algorithms are decoupled from the storage systems. Due that Jujutsu can be used with Git repositories.

Benny also shared several features that are only present in Jujutsu, like every change to the working copy ends up as a commit, so we have a snapshot for all changes without worrying about actually committing in the CVS/Mercurial/Git sense. All operations are also logged, which makes doing undo/redo very easy.

Running NetBSD on the Wii U - Harold Gutch (<hgutch>)

Harold Gutch (<hgutch>) showed how to install and run NetBSD on the Wii U from scratch and without any kind of permanent modification to the internal flash or RTC!

In order to do that, a browser exploit is used. Harold showed how to host all of that locally on NetBSD that will act as a wireless Access Point in order to avoid any Internet access and dependency.

He then run NetBSD, started X11 and playing rogue(6) given that at the end the Wii U is a console and then ended up running ATF tests.

It was amazing seeing NetBSD running on Wii U!

"Impromptu" talks and thanks

We had other two improptu and last minute talks and then Harold wrapped up and thanked everyone who attended the summit.

NetBSD Dinner

NetBSD summits usually end with a NetBSD dinner!

This time Benny organized the dinner and we went to Brasserie St. Hubert. Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of veg-friendly food, so I only got a pasta that was not that great (but, hey!, if we are talking about pasta, I am probably a picky italian!). The Crème Brûlée as dessert was more interesting and the choices of beers were also okay.

Eirik Øverby (he is doing very cool things, especially with old hardware, if you don't know, check his fediverse). He persuaded some of us to stay longer: for the company of a beer together, he offered a cab back to the hotel. It was hard to say no! We tried to find some places around the brasserie, but all of them were full. We went a bit back and forth and finally stopped at Python - Beer Cellar. I had some nice hazy IPAs, we were at a table outside, the weather and night were lovely and we stopped there talking together until they no longer permitted us to stay outside.

When the cab arrived it was a Tesla. We were in four: Eirik, Christoph, Harold and me. Both Eirik and Christoph are tall. Eirik sat in the front seat. Harold sat on the rear seat, and I sat in the rear seat in the middle seat (I was the smallest in the group! :)). Only Christoph was left and he is so tall that the Tesla looked so tiny. He had some difficulties to enter and he started cursing Tesla and I wasn't able to hold back my laughter! :) At the end, all of us were in! We had a ride of 10-15 minutes back to the hotel. Unfortunately, the hotel bar was closed. Harold (<hgutch>) hotel was a 30-ish minutes walk.

Yes, I needed one for the road but I also wanted to not leave Harold alone! With Harold we agreed that if we found some bar along the way we would have stopped. It was also a great excuse for a walk. We stopped in a billiard hall, Snooker The Faculty. We sat at the counter. It was a nice atmosphere: people playing billiards, sipping a Belgian Strong Dark Ale and talking. Every once in a while we needed to pay attention to the cue sticks of players because we were near the pool tables. :) Harold went back to his hotel and I went back to mine. It was 3AM in the morning and the streets were much more peaceful and silent through the night. Only the sound of street sweepers broke that quiet.

Saturday 12, 2026: First day of talks and Social Event

I slept probably only around 4 hours but I felt awake and excited for the first day of talks! I went to the conference venue on foot and arrived 30-ish minutes earlier so I could socialize a bit with folks in the hallway track.

We were welcomed by Henning Brauer to EuroBSDCon 2026! He thanked the sponsors and organizers and then reminded us about the 6-2-1-13 rule for having a nice EuroBSDCon, every day :):

• 6 hours of sleep
• 2 meals
• 1 shower
• 13 beers

He then shared information and contacts for the conference and social event.

Both on Saturday and Sunday, I had my calendar full of the talks I wanted to attend. There were a lot of interesting talks and often I wanted to attend all the 3 tracks. I will share here the ones I have attended, but I definitely need to check the EuroBSDCon 2026 schedule and (re)watch the video recordings (all talks got streamed and recorded!).

What has (can) the EU Cyber Resilience Act done (do) for you? - Peter N. M. Hansteen

The first talk I have attended was the Peter N. M Hansteen's one about Cyber Resiliance Act (CRA).

The CRA is a European Union regulation for products that have digital elements.

In the CRA, for products that have digital elements running open source, there are three actors involved:

• Manufacturers
• Open Source Stewards
• Open Source Developers and Maintainers

Peter illustrated what each actor must do. He also introduced Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), the CycloneDX and System Package Data Exchange (SPDX) specifications.

He also summarized what The FreeBSD Foundation is doing in order to generate SBOM required by CRA.

The talk ends with a lot of references to deepen CRA. I should definitely dig into it!

The night 142 of my servers went up in the clouds. Physically. - Stefano Marinelli

The second talk I attended was by Stefano Marinelli. I have enjoyed Stefano talk so much! He shared the story of the OVH Strasbourg datacenter fire. The incident affected 142 server of his clients.

Stefano did great engineering and was able to completely restore all his clients' servers in less than a (sleepless) day.

The postmortem is very fun and he also shares insightful suggestions on how to engineer backup and restore. BSD systems are great for that because they permit building an infrastructure that is simple, easy to understand and resilient.

Linux emulation on NetBSD: How broken is it? - Stephen Borrill

After lunch, I attended Stephen's talk about compat_linux(8).

Stephen introduced Linux emulationcompatibility, there is no emulation because it is running native code on the CPU.

He then shared about the Google Summer of Code 2026 project by Henrique Brito that he mentored.

Henrique, with the mentorship of Stephen, worked on running Linux Test Project on NetBSD in order to test compat_linux(8).

In doing that, Henrique found several bugs, Linux being not POSIX but NetBSD compat_linux(8) being POSIX for some given syscalls... And he was also able to trigger some kernel panics (that got fixed!).

If you have missed it, I suggest reading the blog posts written by Henrique:

• Google Summer of Code 2026 Reports: Testing Compat Linux: Syscall testing
• Google Summer of Code 2026 Reports: Testing Compat Linux: Syscall testing, part 2

Stephen's talk was also featured on LWN.net in the article Testing compat_linux on NetBSD with the Linux Test Project written by Joe Brockmeier.

I/O and theorems and barriers, oh my - Taylor R Campbell

I then went to Riastradh talk about memory ordering, obscure issues involving paravirtualization and how mappings vary in different architectures!

Taylor already did a talk about memory barriers between CPU at EuroBSDCon 2022 in Memory barriers in practice for software engineers (video)

Riastradh initially reassured that this talk was more about cases that most engineers probably do not need to deal with but are exciting and fun... But then he added that if you deal with device drivers, obscure protocols, then you may have to deal with this stuff! :)

In the first part, Riastradh discussed memory barriers. He shared several cases for different architectures.

The second part was about theorems. He introduced herd7 memory model simulator.

The third part was about I/O, using bus_dma(9). In that part he also shared several bugs that can happen with paravirtualized devices when emulating NetBSD/virt68k on amd64 PR kern/60144 virtio(4) cache coherence issue that is maybe not that exotic! :)

Base system packages in Production: A Practical Overview - Lukas Engelhardt

I went to the talk about the pkgbase project in FreeBSD by Lukas Engelhardt.

pkgbase is similar to NetBSD syspkgs. The idea is to maintain base system utilities as packages too.

Lukas also showed how to build and locally host packages. He then showed several upgrade paths. When doing that, I have also learned about ZFS boot environments that permits to easily rollback if an upgrade goes bad.

It was nice to learn more about FreeBSD. Although I am not familiar with FreeBSD, Lukas has done a great job in sharing that also with folks unfamiliar like me and at the same time being useful for more experienced FreeBSD folks.

Running BSD workloads in Linux environments as OCI containers - Charalampos Mainas

The last talk of the day that I attended was by Charalampos Mainas. I had already attended a Project Demo, always by Charalampos, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 last March and I was curious to learn more about it.

After introducing the background on VM and unikernel, Charalampos showed Bunny that permits building FreeBSD, NetBSD, rump and more like containers.

He then showed how to deploy them using urunc. Urunc is a Container Runtime Interface (CRI) for unikernels. Urunc is also OCI compatible, which permits using existing tools that support containers... That also permits to have FreeBSD and NetBSD pods in Kubernetes!

He also showed several benchmarks and also a lot of demos on how that works.

The talk was very nice and both urunc and Bunny are very interesting.

Social event

The social event was at Royal Museum for Central Africa.

We walked to Montgomery where three historical trams departed to the museum. We got in the tram 1348, a tram produced since World War 1, slower than more recent ones but definitely more charming! :) The road to go to the museum was very pleasant through 3km in the woods.

The museum was huge and both outside and inside were very impressive! We got our badge scanned and then we had a welcome drink. We had less than two hours to visit it and unfortunately that was too little time to stop, read and interact with what was exposed.

The bar of the museum was reserved for the social event and there was a buffet and people could grab drinks/wine/beers. I had penne all'arrabbiata (ok, not very al dente but I can not complain this time! :)), fresh salad, some bread, chips and a couple of beers. I sat down only to eat and then walked around and socialized and talked with folks.

I took the tram back at around 23:00. With a small group of other BSD folks, we got back to the hotel a bit later than midnight. We tried to search for a bar near the hotel, but they were all full and we then decided to call it a night.

Sunday 13, 2026: Second and last day of talks

I decided to recover some energy and sleep properly on Saturday night, so I ended up missing the first two talks. I had breakfast with Christoph and then we walked to the venue.

We arrived around 11 and we spent some time in the hallway room.

GEFS: The File Shredder of the Future. - Ori Bernstein

The first talk I have attended was by Ori Bernstein about the GEFS file system.

GEFS was originally developed for Plan 9 and it is shipped 9Front. In 9Front it is also used for the build infrastructure.

Ori also ported it to OpenBSD. One of the main motivations to port it is to have a crash-safe, snapshottable and fast file system in OpenBSD too.

It was instructive to learn about several data structures used by GEFS (like B-Epsilon Trees) and digging through the internal and implementation of a filesystem.

Ori also demoed it live on 9Front!

Family photo and Lunch

Before lunch we had a family photo:

For lunch there was lasagna, I got the vegetarian one and it was very tasty!

Advances in OpenBSD's pkg_add - Marc Espie

After lunch, I attended Marc Espie sharing updates about OpenBSD ports pkg_tools.

Marc shared several problems and solutions about packaging in OpenBSD, for example, packages that share users and groups. He also discussed TeX Live packaging and the trickiness of keeping the package up to date and splitting it into different subpackages.

Using modern *BSD to get a 4.2BSD system from 1983 running - Walter Belgers

Then I went to Walter Belgers talk about using modern *BSD to get a 4.23BSD system from 19839 running.

In this talk Walter shared his adventure on restoring Sun 2/50 and Sun 2/120 and booting SunOS 4.0.3 on them. That was definitely not straightforward.

On Sun 2/120 he also successfully ran NetBSD/sun2 11.0!

That was both instructive and fun and also showed how important digital preservation is. It is also charming seeing machines older than 40 years could run NetBSD.

Keeping up with language-based packaging systems in Ports (especially Python) - Charlie Li

After Walter's talk, I went to Charlie Li talk about Operating System package systems and their interaction with language-based packaging systems.

That was interesting and despite Charlie focusing mostly on FreeBSD Ports, what he shared is also relevant and interesting to other package systems.

Looney Tunes: FreeBSD, rsync, and ZFS - Mateusz Piotrowski

The last talk I attended was by Mateusz Piotrowski about a performance investigation and tuning of a slow backup job.

The talk was very instructive and Mateusz also shared his process on how to investigate that. There were also a lot of great takeaways:

• Mind your locks and queues
• One size fits most
• Measure first and measure last

Closing session - Henning Brauer

Unfortunately, EuroBSDCon 2026 came to an end too! Henning thanked sponsors and organizers.

Several next conferences were also announced:

• AsiaBSDCon 2027 will be in the 2nd or 3rd weekend of March in Tokyo, Japan. Call for papers will be announced soon and the deadline for submission will be 20 November 2026!
• BSDCan 2027 will be July 7-10 in Vancouver, Canada
• EuroBSDCon 2027 will be late September or early October in Bratislava, Slovakia

NetBSD Dinner

Several of us had dinner at L'Ultime Atome, a French-Belgian restaurant. That was the place where I get the best Belgian food! I had a yummy soupe à l’oignon, a delicious ratatouille and a salad. I really enjoyed all the dishes. All the beers were also local and I have tasted a couple of them.

We got food and stayed there until late. Together with Christoph, Stephen and Harold, we went back to our hotel on foot because it was only 20-30 minutes walk.

Stephen and Harold were staying in the speaker hotel, a different hotel where Christoph and I were staying and I went with them to find an open bar for another beer. We ended up in another pool hall, always near Stephen and Harold hotel. We had a beer, talked and then we said see you soon.

Conclusion

EuroBSDCon 2026 was great! I had a bunch of fun, learned a lot and it was very nice to meet both old friends and meet new ones. Getting back home from EuroBSDCon also gives me a lot of energy!

I would like to thank EuroBSDCon Foundation, the Organizing Committee and the Program Committee for organizing such a wonderful conference!

I would also like to thank The NetBSD Foundation that sponsored the NetBSD Summit and Harold Gutch (<hgutch>) for organizing and managing it smoothly!

Looking forward to seeing you in Bratislava, Slovakia!

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