EuroBSDCon 2025 - Recap and Observations

By Greg Wallace, Director of Partnerships, NetActuate

EuroBSDCon was held September 24-28 in Zagreb, Croatia. This annual conference, organized by the EuroBSDCon Foundation, takes place every Fall in a different European city. As described on the site: “The event focuses on users and developers working on and with 4.4BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) based operating systems and related projects.” This includes FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Illumos, and others. 

Set-up as a three-track event so that each OS has an opportunity to share updates and dive deep into ongoing projects, the two-day EuroBSDCon sessions are preceded by a day of workshops and a one-day (or like this year a two-day) FreeBSD Developer Summit. 

FreeBSD Dev Summit kicked off on Wednesday, September 24 with yours truly presenting on two years of the FreeBSD Enterprise Working Group. I started this initiative while at the FreeBSD Foundation, and now as part of my company’s commitment to supporting open source, NetActuate provides me with the flexibility to continue this work.

I divided the session (slides here and recording here) between a read out on the WG’s goals, process, and progress, on one hand; and learnings, observations, and opinions on the other. To summarize, although I was naive to think when we started in August 2023 that we would make substantial progress on all 19 (!) workstreams in 2H 2023 (🤣), today 9 are Graduated (47%) and 5 are in process (26%). That’s a positive outcome for 73%! The remaining ones are Relegated due to either being blocked by third parties or due to lack of interest. Definitely check out the slides and recording if you’re interested. 

I am really happy with this progress. At the risk of sounding cliche, I think it’s an example of the Peter Drucker quote “efficiency is futile without effective targeting.” At launch and throughout the past two years, the group has listened to users, targeted the things that matter most, and doggedly kept moving forward. Great job everyone!!

Friday offered several daylong workshops. Of the many appealing options, my choice was never in doubt: Eurobhyvecon!!

bhyve, the type 2 hypervisor native to the BSDs and Illumos, benefits from a spirited community of vendors, users, and volunteers and has lately gained strong industry interest as an emerging VMware alternative. A long-standing enterprise and general user request has been adding a modern management system. The Enterprise WG put emphasis on this and recently the FreeBSD Foundation supported the work of Hayzam Sherif and their Sylve system. The demo wowed the crowd!

At least two “enterprise” bhyve-based solutions are also launching – Kairos.ai and Panaro Tech. It will be exciting to see so much work going into the upstream and making bhyve better every day.

Both at Eurobhyvecon and throughout the rest of the conference, another big theme emerged for me – cross-BSD and cross-Unix collaboration. For example, Illumos-based Oxide has done amazing work on live migration and other key enterprise requirements for their customized version of bhyve. At Eurobhyvecon, long-time Illumos developer Hans Rosenfeld presented their work so far to port CPUID/live migration from Illumos to FreeBSD. You can watch the presentation here. 

And during his excellent talk on updating OpenJDK on FreeBSD, Harald Eilertsen observed that there is another excellent opportunity to collaborate across the BSDs in the upstream OpenJDK – check it out here.

I was so excited to learn that the Sunday keynote would be none other than Daniel Stenberg, curl maintainer. I have been a longtime admirer of his unapologetic and articulate explanation and defense of open source maintainers. It was inspiring to hear his take on the latest challenge to maintainers - AI Vulnerability slop – check it out here. 

Last but not least, the event was the perfect occasion to reconnect with long-time collaborators and to meet several in person whom I’ve only known online. 

As is tradition, the location and dates of the following year’s event were announced at the final session. We’ll see you in Brussels, September 10-13 2026!