Interview: Andi Kleen, Long Term Linux Kernel Contributor

By Dawn M. Foster (91 posts) on September 10, 2009 at 8:00 am

Andi Kleen is a long term Linux kernel contributor. He worked on many different kernel areas, including network, file systems, scalability and low level architecture code. He served as the x86-64 and later also the i386 architecture kernel maintainer until 2007. His employment history includes support for media art, working on the Linux kernel in SUSE Labs at SUSE and later Novell for over 9 years and currently at the Intel Open Source Technology Center. He is a regular speaker at Linux conferences about kernel topics. Andi Kleen lives in Bremen, Germany, and enjoys hiking, cycling, music and reading.

Dawn: What do you enjoy about working in Intel's Open Source Technology Center?

Andi: Intel gives me a lot of interesting technologies to look at. That's great for me because I'm a technology junkie.

Originally when I started working on the Linux kernel, I did work fairly high up the software stack (TCP/IP networking), but I've found myself more and more going down towards hardware. I learned a lot about that at Intel OTC and I like learning new stuff.

I also like working on free software (did it for most of my career), so a lot of my work is not only working with Intel people but all kinds of other people working on the Linux kernel. OTC is a good
environment for doing that.

Dawn: You've contributed to numerous Linux kernel areas. What have you been working on recently?

Andi: For some time now I've been looking at server reliability. While that may sound boring at first, it has various interesting details that only show when you look closer.

I used to work more as a generalist (i.e. as x86 kernel maintainer), daily switching between various different areas, but you lose focus somewhat this way. I found it actually quite refreshing to focus on a specific area for a longer time again.

On the other hand I've also had the opportunity to look at some other things, like I did some work on performance monitoring recently, looking at scalability of larger systems, and a few other random things I always work on.

Dawn: Out of all of the work you've done with the Linux kernel over the years, what is the one thing that you are the most proud of?

Andi: Nursing the x86-64 kernel port from the humble beginnings to its wide use. Seeing the code you've been working on for a long time grown up and being widely used by lots of people is great.

Dawn: What are a few of your all-time favorite books and what have you been reading recently?

It's hard to say, there are so many good books. I have a big collection.

I'm a big fan of all the works of Theodore Sturgeon for example.

I also do a lot of non fiction reading in some areas I find interesting. I used to be into history books of all sorts. Recently I've mostly reading up on biology, especially the history of life, which is really awe inspiring.

*Photo by Len Brown

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