Interview: Sarah Sharp, Linux Kernel Hacker

By Dawn M. Foster (91 posts) on July 29, 2009 at 8:00 am

Sarah Sharp is a Linux Kernel hacker at Intel's Open Source Technology Center. In her spare time, she volunteers for the Portland State Aerospace Society, an open source/open hardware group that builds amateur rockets. Sarah is also a member of Portland's Code 'N Splode group.

Dawn: I recently read on Engadget that you developed a Linux driver for the NEC USB 3.0 controller. Can you describe what other Linux work you do within the Open Source Technology Center (OTC) at Intel?

Sarah: The Linux driver is designed to work with all xHCI (USB 3.0) host controllers, not just the NEC host controller.

Within the Open Source Technology Center, I work on Linux USB support. That includes working on USB device power management. We're basically trying to suspend USB devices when they're idle, so that you don't drain your laptop battery when you plug in a USB mouse. It's challenging because some USB devices don't properly support auto-suspend, and we don't want to break any devices that already work under Linux.

Dawn: What is the most interesting story that you have about being a Linux Kernel hacker?

Sarah: I think the best part of being a Linux Kernel hacker is interacting with other developers at conferences. You can solve problems a lot faster in a 5 minute face-to-face chat than a day's worth of email exchanges. Plus you get to hang out after the conference is over. I got to play board games with the Linux graphics guys and Linus Torvalds once, which was a lot of fun.

Dawn: How did you get involved in the Portland State Aerospace Society?

Sarah: I got involved in the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) because my then-boyfriend-now-husband dragged me to a meeting. At first I thought these people who were launching 13 foot rockets were just crazy! Then I decided they were cool, and I wanted to join the group. I wasn't sure where to jump in on a technical project, so I became PSAS' student group president and handled the group's finances and marketing for a year.

Once I knew everyone and was exposed to several projects, I worked on creating USB sensor nodes for my senior capstone project. The USB nodes pass data from GPS, IMUs, and other sensors to the flight computer on board, which then decides when to deploy the parachutes. Check out my Linux Journal article if you want more info on that project.

Dawn: What are the advantages of using open source/open hardware to build rockets?

Sarah: PSAS has everything on our wiki, including board schematics, design documents, software, and analysis of failed launches. There are several advantages of keeping all that information open and using only open source.

An advantage of using open source software and hardware with fully-open specifications and firmware is there's no gotchas. If there's a bug in the firmware for our wireless card, we might be able to fix it. If the open source driver for the card is accessing a register wrong, we can check the open spec and contribute a patch to the maintainer.

One obvious advantage to having all our software and hardware designs openly available on our website is it's easy for new members to find information and ramp up on a project. We also learn from any group that takes a design from our website and uses it in their own project. If another group wanted to take our flight computer software and run it on their own rocket, our group would learn from that experiment and be able to improve our code.

It's also beneficial to the community because it can save other rocket developers time and money. For example, we spent 3 years developing a spread sheet to generate a board layout for a cylindrical patch antenna, based on desired transmission frequencies. A design company quoted us $30,000 to design and build one patch antenna. With our spread sheet, it costs about $500.

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Comments (1)

January 19, 2012 6:59 PM PST


Damani Proctor		 Was looking at getting in contact with Sarah to ask some questions about the Portland Aerospace Society.

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