Contents 

James Bottomley
Talk
Panel Discussion
Media  

James Bottomley

James Bottomley is a Director of the Linux Foundation and Chair of its technical Advisory Board. He is Linux Kernel maintainer of the SCSI subsystem, the Linux Voyager port and the 53c700 driver.  He has also made contributions to PA-RISC Linux development in the area of MA/device model abstraction. He was born and grew up in the United Kingdom.  He went to university at Cambridge in 1985 for both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees.  He joined AT&T Bell labs in 1995 to work on Distributed Lock Manager technology for clustering. In 1997 he moved to the LifeKeeper HA project. Bottomley now works with his spouse as a member of the Hansen Partnership, a private consulting company.

Talk

The linux kernel may seem like a daunting place for people who are (or even for people who are not) new to hacking Open Source operating systems.  This talk gave an overview of getting into kernel hacking, which areas of the kernel (and its APIs) might be more amenable to a bit of fine tuning and how to go about getting involved (including mailing list etiquette and all the important business of figuring out whom to pay attention to and whom to ignore).  By the nature of the speaker, the talk was focused on kernel device drivers.  The talk was rounded out with anecdotes about the best kernel contributions.

This talk took place on Saturday, April 5th, 2008.

Panel Discussion

James Bottomley was also a panelist in the Flourish 2008 Panel Discussion. More information can be found on the Flourish 2008 Panel Discussion main page.

Media

Embedded video of Hacking the Linux Kernel for Fun and Profit:

Downloads from Hacking the Linux Kernel for Fun and Profit:

• Presentation Slides (PDF) (66.9 KiB)
• Xvid Video (AVI) (455 MiB)

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• James Bottomley
• Panel Discussion
• Hacking the Linux Kernel for Fun and Profit