BOFs Descriptions

[Ellie Young]

The following descriptions were compiled for the Association
by Mary Seabrook: 

             Prescheduled Birds of a Feather Sessions  (BOFS)
			USENIX Dallas Conference

       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 Cry-
       stal Foyer at the Grand Kempinksi Hotel.


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  availa-
       bility, 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  Sys-
       tem.   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 Architec-
       ture, 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  ser-
       vices  have  been  in  use  at  MIT and around the world for
       several years, and the BOF is a forum for those who current-
       ly  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  ques-
       tions.
       Presenters: Michel Gien, Lori Grob and Jim Lipkis

6:30 p.m.
       Salons  IV  &  V; UUNET; Rick Adams, uunet

       This is the regular UUNET BOF, and will  discuss  various
       matters and issues related to uunet. 


8:00 pm - 10:00 pm

       Salon  I; NNTP  Managers; Eliot Lear, IntelliGenetics

       The outline for this BOF is proposed to be: An  introduc-
       tion  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 dis-
       cussion of improvements  including  NNTP  v2.0,  interaction
       with  C News and other innovations.  There will be an oppor-
       tunity to voice new problems with attention to the following
       areas,  External  caches, High volume groups and New hierar-
       chies 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 evo-
       lution.
       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 at 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 infor-
       mal 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

       This 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 got-
       ten  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.