Events on Marcello Barnaba

MetalOS talk at All Systems Go! 2025

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I presented a talk at All Systems Go 2025, the foundational Linux userspace conference. The conference is organised mostly by the systemd team, and it’s a yearly meeting for all people working on Linux systems software.

This year’s theme has mostly been “containers, containers, containers” with many new features in systemd to support containerisation as well as practical experiences from people working in the field on how they’re using systemd and collateral software to build container infrastructures.

I presented together with my colleague Serge Dubrouski our work in building an Operating System at Meta scale. We run an image-based operating system, but the company comes from two decades of updating the OS online, so we had to design a suitable migration strategy and set the foundation for the future.

We describe how we cut CentOS releases from upstream, the OSS tools we’ve built to create OS images, and the internal technology (MetalOS) that we came up with to build an OS that runs on millions of Linux servers.

About the logo: it’s metal because MetalOS runs on bare metal, and the antlers are a nod to Antlir — ANoTher Linux Image buildeR — the open-source build system we use to produce the OS images.

You can also download the video for offline viewing.

Questions? Comments? Rant below! 🤣

PH-Neutral 0x7db

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 17:00:00 +0000

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2026 retrospective
PH-Neutral was the last edition — true to the motto on the badge, “if it is good, they stop making it.” Phenoelit disbanded shortly after. Many of the attack techniques described here (ASLR bypass, Chip & PIN downgrade, TETRA interception) have since been patched or mitigated, but the underlying lessons about implementation flaws in “secure” technologies remain timeless. The DWARF exploitation research by James Oakley and Sergey Bratus became a seminal paper in the field.

“If it is good, they stop making it”, the payoff printed on the conference necklaces, distributed to every participant, along with an über-l33t badge customized with our nickname and the key hash.

Being my first experience at an international security conf (I’ve only been to the ccc2k+7 camp), and being a ph outsider ‘cause I never participated to previous editions, the boot keynote held by FX, staffer and frontman, has been enlightening: “you ought to be here!”, he yelled while pointing at the stage, wearing a white shirt with the Phenoelit logo printed on both arms.

“This conference has never started on time”, he continued, “so there was no reason to do that for this last one”. the schedule is straightforward: party, the next day's talks from 12.00PM to 7.30PM, then party, and the last day's talks from 12.00PM to 5.30PM. definitely a setup well-playing with the available alcohol :-D.

Afterwards, another speaker informed us that the wi-fi access keys we received at the registration allows us to use a 6 APs/3 repeaters beast driven by an OpenBSD box – they want the audience to hack it because, well, “you are the Worst Case Scenario.” :-)

Rome RSC 2011

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 18:00:00 +0000

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2026 retrospective
RVM is still around but most Rubyists have switched to rbenv, asdf, or mise for version management. The Ruby Social Club meetups faded out, but the Italian Ruby community lives on through RubyDay and various local groups.

Thanks to @jodosha efforts and praising the former ~~Javaday~~ event, now renamed into codemotion that brought in Rome many Ruby developers from Milan, Padua and other parts of Italy – the first official Ruby Social Club in Rome has been a great success. Of course, officialty is measured only in the amount of twitter spam posted about it! :-): earlier RSCs in Rome go back in time to 2006 organized by current mikamai members and more meetups promoted by @jeko in 2007.

What matters is that there’s a community, there’s a passion, and there’s love to share knowledge - no matter who holds the meetings, the important thing is that they’re being held :-).

The event was simple and direct - some beers first, then my keynote on RVM and Ruby interpreters, then Luca’s one announcing his minege.ms project and after real social networking :-). I met @gravityblast after much time we didn’t meet, knew the PIP group and met @svarione, @punkmanit, @leonardoperna, @riggasconi, @ogeidix and other smart people. Moreover, we spent quite some nice time together, making up a really lousy and funny week-end. Of course, huge kudos to @nhaima’s car - that tirelessly carried us around Rome for two days :-)

Now, looking forward to the next meetup, thanks everyone who participated, who offered me beers and, last but not least, thanks to @etapeta for bringing me in time at the meeting - you’re the real hero :-).

Panmind spin-offs presented at Ruby Social Club Milan

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

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2026 retrospective
Panmind is long gone. The GitHub repos still exist as historical artifacts, but the Rails plugin ecosystem described here was replaced by gems and engines long ago.

On July 22nd 2010, Mikamai hosted a Ruby Social Club in Milan, where nearly 50 people attended watching five speeches about Ruby, Web development and Startups. I was glad to be one of the speakers, and I presented a set of Rails plugins we spun off from our latest (and greatest) project: Panmind (read more on the about page) and released as Open Source on GitHub.

The keynote is split in two parts: the first one explains why you should follow the sane software engineering principle of writing modular and interest-separated code and then how you could (and should) extract it from your Rails application by decoupling configuration and then prepare for the Open Source release, by writing documentation AND presenting to a Ruby event so, hopefully, someone else will write unit tests! :-)

We released an SSL helper plugin that implements filters (like Rails’ ssl_requirement) but also named route helpers: no more <%= url_for :protocol => 'https' %>! You’ll have something like plain_root_url and ssl_login_url - like they were built into the framework.

Then, a Google Analytics ultra-simple plugin, with <noscript> support, a couple of test helpers and an embryo of a JS Analytics framework - hopefully it’ll evolve into a complete jQuery plugin. Then, a ReCaptcha interface, with AJAX validation support and eventually a Zendesk interface for Rails.

We released also more code on Panmind’s GitHub account, including the nifty AJAX Navigation Framework that implements all the boilerplate code for the ultra-fast AJAX navigation of panmind contents and projects.

Girl Geek Dinners Workshop @Apple Store, 16 May 2009, Rome

Mon, 18 May 2009 15:00:00 +0000

«Women! The knife grinder is here!» – Apart from funny jokes ;) the italian Apple Store together with Girl Geek Dinners Roma organized on May 16, 2009, a workshop about mobile lifestyle (focusing on the iPhone, of course).

Let’s start from the beginning: what are the Girl Geek Dinners? Linda explained to the audience (nearly 20 people) that a geek is a person passionate about technology in a broader sense: the GGD is a group devoted to aggregate women interested about the internet, new medias and technologic lifestyles. Women are often underestimated in geek communities, and this embarassing clichè generated a lot of discussion in the past, and it’s still unsolved (in my opinion).

The GGD italian group was born in 2007 in Milan, and then arrived to Rome in 2008, and is also present in Bologna and in the Marche and Emilia-Romagna states.

So, the GGD group tries to generate a “critical mass” of geek women, to abolish a stereotype that “computer programmers / power users” are only men: in GGD events boys listen and girls talk, then they blog, exchange vCards (and PGP keys, I’d guess ;) and in general try to harness women power and skills in the field of the computer industry. Networking and a dive into social media is the most efficient way nowadays to reach a great audience, and to build rapidly the aforementioned critical mass: that’s why the GGDs event was focused on social mobile applications and general productivity ones. Presented by two official Apple Trainers (Simona and Riccardo), the workshop started @11.30 AM and lasted nearly one hour.

Facebook Developer Garage 2009, Milan (Italy)

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0000

This is my recap of the first italian facebook developer garage, held in milan on April 23, 2009, and hosted by mikamai. the morning has been dedicated to developer sessions, the afternoon to marketing & communication ones. some videos of the event are available here.

Morning: developer session

The first talk was held by James Leszczenski, facebook engineer, who presented the connect platform vision, mission, and values. interesting, besides the talk, for user participation: the audience was deeply interested about which information they get from facebook, how should they handle it, and which means connect does provide to match identities and find friends on an enabled web site.

Later I had the occasion to ask James about whether FB was inclined or not to adopt OpenID as an authentication method: he said that connect and OpenID both allow users to have unique login credentials to access multiple sites, but connect also allows to exploit the power of facebook social graph to allow users to communicate and share information. so, the short answer is “no”. Then I proposed him to implement OpenID on FB itself, so that connect could become really a superset of openID, but he said that “as a company, these are tough decisions I could not give an answer right now”. Fair enough :).

UPDATE: on April 27th 2009, techcrunch reports they heard that Facebook will embrace OpenID as a mean to authenticate users. Great news, looking forward for an official statement from Facebook! :)

The second talk was held by Vincenzo Acinapura, who described the basic means to create an application on the facebook platform. He explored the technologies behind it (XFBML, FQL, FBJS), the main integration points within the platform (notifications, publisher, ...), and he showed sample code to implement some of the most used FBML tags (fb:comments, fb:share, fb:feed, and so on). He eventually remembered the importance of automating the deploy of applications, and suggested to use capistrano to achieve it.