The Linux Foundation | 27 November 2017
Mauro Carvalho Chehab answers a few questions about his work on the Linux kernel.
According to the recent Linux Kernel Development Report, the Linux operating system runs 90 percent of the public cloud workload, has 62 percent of the embedded market share, and 100 percent of the TOP500 supercomputers. It also runs 82 percent of the world’s smartphones and nine of the top ten public clouds. However, the sustained growth of this open source ecosystem would not be possible without the steady development of the Linux kernel.
In this series, we are highlighting the ongoing work of some Linux kernel contributors. Here, Mauro Carvalho Chehab, Open Source Director at Samsung Research Brazil, answers a few questions about his work on the kernel.
Linux Foundation: What role do you play in the community and what subsystem(s) do you work on?
I’m responsible for the Open Source efforts at Samsung Research Brazil, as part of Samsung’s Open Source Group. I maintain the media and EDAC (Error Detection and Correction) kernel subsystems.
Linux Foundation: What have you been working on this year?
This year, I did a lot of patches that improves Linux documentation. A lot of them were related to the conversion from the XML-based DocBook docs to a markup language (Restructured Text). Thanks to that, no documents use the legacy document system anymore. I also finally closed the documentation gap at the DVB API, with was out of sync for more than 10 years! I also did several bug fixes at the media subsystem, including the 4.9 breakage of many drivers that were doing DMA via stack.
Linux Foundation: What do you think the kernel community needs to work on in the upcoming year?
We should continue our work to support new device drivers and get rid of out of tree stuff. At the media subsystem, we should work to add support for newer TV standards, like ATSC version 3 and to improve support for embedded systems, on both DVB and V4L2 APIs.
Linux Foundation: Why do you contribute to the Linux kernel?
Because it is fun! Seriously, I strongly believe that the innovation process on computer engineering is currently driven by Linux. Working on its kernel has provided me the opportunity of working with great developers and helping to improve the top operating system.
You can learn more about the Linux kernel development process and read more developer profiles in the full report. Download the 2017 Linux Kernel Development Report now.