Interview: Ashok Raj, Senior Staff Software Engineer for OpenSolaris

By Dawn M. Foster (91 posts) on September 17, 2009 at 8:00 am

Ashok Raj is a Senior Staff Software engineer at Intel Corporation in the Open Source Technology Center focused on making Xeon the platform of choice for OpenSolaris. His recent work includes adding Nehalem Support, implementing IOMMU, and interrupt remapping support for OpenSolaris. He played a crucial role in adding RAS features such as CPU hotplug in Linux. He was part of the team that launched InfiniBand support, and led the team on implementation for Linux and EFI support for InfiniBand. Ashok joined Intel in 1999 after spending 3 years at Siemens Pyramid Technologies on mass storage architectures. He also worked in India at Wipro Technologies and HCL limited for a period of 3 years. He holds a master's degree in Computer science from Anna University, India. You can read his personal blog for some random off-work rumblings.

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

Ashok: It's Fun... Simply put enjoyable. Where you can get to work on a variety of things and cutting edge technology with some of the brightest minds at Intel? Working in Open Source at Intel wasn't easy in the early days, but things changed for the good. Nowadays Open Source development has become the way things are done. It has simply improved Intel's image in the Open Source Community and certainly Intel's platforms have become the choice for running Open Source software because we release hardware support early instead of catching up. I particularly enjoy working on high end RAS features for Intel platforms. I used to work on Linux enabling CPU hotplug, and now things have become more interesting with Nehalem-EX and new RAS features it brings along. These days I work on Solaris Fault Management Architecture (FMA) and am learning why Solaris is so cool on the Inside!

Dawn: Why is it important for Intel to focus on making Xeon the platform of choice for OpenSolaris?

Ashok: Intel platforms based on Intel® Xeon® 5500 have some great features that are perfect for the enterprise. Solaris is one of the most popular OS's in the server space. Solaris on Intel Xeon platforms bring out the best that both products have to offer. Solaris on Intel provides an excellent platform for datacenter customers. Intel is working very closely with the OpenSolaris community. We have been contributing to key areas such as: Performance, Energy Efficiency, Reliability, and Server Virtualization. OpenSolaris on Xeon processors will be a key to Intel.

Dawn: You wrote a blog post in January about how OpenSolaris should be more open. Has much changed since January to make OpenSolaris more open?

Ashok: Well, my first exposure to open source development was Linux Kernel development. Linux development is fast-paced development model and less process overhead. The development model is very different in OpenSolaris. It has a more structured product based approach to development, and there certainly are things learned and improving. I would consider this process as evolving and will improve over time. Intel has contributed significant code and features to OpenSolaris in a relatively short amount of time and the SUN engineers we work with are simply astounding! I am proud what Intel and Sun have done together for OpenSolaris and hope it only improves as there are more interesting things in the horizon.

Dawn: What do you do for fun when you aren't working on open source software at Intel?

Ashok: When we built a home about 5 years ago, I was thrilled with home-audio, home theater and the like. I can only program them, but I'm a very bad handyman... like I can't pull wires or crimp cables (I'm just bad at it). I worked with a good company to install distributed audio/video for my whole house, I can listen internet radio in any room, use the same system as a paging system, talk to the person in front door with any standard home phone... so if anyone is building or wiring for your home, I can give you ideas! I really enjoy playing Tennis, and watching ... yea... I have the old recorded McEnroe, Lendl matches that I watch maybe twice a year! Cooking and eating some excellent food my lovely wife prepares (yea added 3 lbs recently). Spending time with my 2 sons (1 technically since the other is off to college) and my daughter. Oh... Wait... I really like to go walks with my 1 ½ year old Labradoodle.

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