Standing for the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board

Standing for the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board

[Vojtech Pavlik]

I am standing for the Linux Foundation Technical advisory board.

Since I'm not attending LinuxCon EU, nor the Kernel Summit, I won't be
there for the TAB election at the evening event either, hence I'll try
to introduce myself in this email.

My first encounter with Linux was Slackware in 1993 with kernel 0.99,
installed from a stack of floppies, and while it was still very young,
the possibility to improve it was a reason to forget about DOS, Xenix,
SINIX, SCO UNIX and LynxOS that I was using back then.

And I did. Initially just a few patches to the (now gone) ARCnet
drivers, then a joystick driver rewrite, eventually a rewrite of the
whole input subsystem and a bunch of work on USB. I rewrote a bunch of
IDE drivers. For a few years I was maintaining the Input and HID
subsystems of the Linux kernel, until my other duties forced me to hand
that over to their present excellent maintainers. I was also a member of
the team that worked on a port of Linux to the x86-64 architecture,
achieving a successful boot when the first silicion was available.

I used Linux to power autonomous robots, figuring out the
limits of its realtime behavior and after a few less than successful
attempts, eventually scored a 4th place in the Eurobot Open robotics
championship.

My day job today is that of a Director of SUSE Labs, a department within
SUSE development that focuses on developing core open source projects:
the Linux kernel, the GNU toolchain, including GCC and glibc and Samba.
My work is to create an environment where open source hackers thrive
inside SUSE, allowing us to contribute to open source projects, while
creating a stable foundation for each release of SUSE's enterprise
distribution.

While the time I can devote to real hacking and coding is limited today,
I still love going very much technical and solving problems by looking
at them from new perspectives: When secure boot came around, I designed
the MOK concept, which allows users to manage their own keys even in the
absence of any help from the platform, returning to them the freedom
that was threatened.

This I'm offering my time, my helping hand and my thoughts to the TAB,
hoping that I can contribute to solving any future problems Linux and
the Linux Foundation may face.

Vojtech Pavlik