mary@unisoft.UUCP (Mary Seabrook) (01/16/91)
With appologies to anyone who was expecting this to 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 bjorn@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. -- mary@unisoft.com +1 415 420 6410 x 124