Linux-MM Developers

Linux-MM Developers

2001/01/04

On this page, you can find links to the (Linux) homepages of the MM developers. If you're not listed, or you know the address and/or homepage of a core developer, please let us know.

The Linux-MM team [linux-mm-www@nl.linux.org]

Andrea Arcangeli: <andrea@e-mind.com>

Andrea is trying to improve the kernel's SMP parallelizebility (sp?) by introducing finer locking mechanisms.
Andrea also has an even more experimental alternative to the Alan Cox kernel patches. Try it if you are bored.

Eric W. Biederman: <ebiederm+eric@ccr.net>

Eric has made a (alpha-release) in-memory filesystem. This is somewhat similar to *BSD and Solaris' tmpfs implementation, but does something more.
He also made a patch that allowed dirty pages in the page cache.

Werner Fink: <werner@suse.de>

Werner is currently working for SuSE Linux and is busy finetuning the current algorithms in order to make a stable Linux 2.2 possible (it's too late to wait for the new features).
He is also adapting the MM subsystem to give better performance on small (<32M) systems under high load.

Richard Gooch: <Richard.Gooch@atnf.CSIRO.AU>

Richard made and maintains the MTRR patch, which can give easy, free 2.5x speedups on bitblit operations when you have a PPro or Pentium II processor. This patch got integrated in the mainstream kernel at version 2.1.99.
The popular DEVFS patch is also made by Richard. DEVFS is a new in-mem filesystem which solves a lot of major/minor number problems and allows the use of >16 SCSI disks. It is included in the mainstream kernel since version 2.3.50.
He also made some nice disk-rescue software, which saved Rik when he was about to loose a disk...

Benjamin C.R. LaHaise: <blah@kvack.org>

PTE chaining, a way to work out from which page-table(s) a physical page gets referenced. This can lead to many beautiful things, such as freeing a big region of memory on demand, or simply a more efficient way of implementing kswapd.
Currently, he is doing a complete revamp of the VM subsystem together with Stephen C. Tweedie.

Pauline Middelink: <middelink@polyware.nl>

Pauline has recently taken charge of the Bigphysarea patch, which allows one to allocate larger (>128kB) chunks of physically contiguous hardware. This is needed for some really dumb framegrabber or data aquisition cards.

Pavel Machek: <pavel@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz>

Has done work on machines with memory of mixed speed.
He issued a working patch for linux-2.1.89 which makes slow memory available as a block device.

Juan Jose Quintela: <quintela@fi.udc.es>

VM balancing with Rik van Riel
MM test suite

Philipp Reisner:

Mergemem, a 'reverse COW mechanism'; this (partly) user-space solution can give you some extra performance on multi-user machines.

Rik van Riel: <riel@nl.linux.org>

Rik is currently working on documentation and this website as a whole.
European students will want to check out EULUG, a project aimed at improving the European university and college-related Linux User Groups.
Scheduling and out-of-memory handling are pretty high on my list too. Look on Rik's patches page to see what's cooking.
A better memory allocator is also on my list of things to do for 2.3.
After that, Rik plans to do some performance enhancements; true swapping (a.k.a. process suspension) and agressive I/O clustering.

Alessandro Rubini: <rubini@ipvvis.unipv.it>

Alessandro has produced some extraordinary drivers for 5933-based framegrabber devices. He hacked the system so that a particular system had 100MB (!) contiguous DMA memory (of 128MB total).
The (rumoured to be excellent) book "Device Drivers for Linux" (ISBN 1565922921) was also written by Alessandro.

Stephen Tweedie: <sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk>

Stephen is (and always has been) one of the core people on memory management, ext2fs and several other projects.
Currently, he is extending ext2fs (b-tree support and journaling) and improving the MM subsystem by means of PTE chaining and SMP spinlocks.
He's also working on support for large-memory (>2GB) on Intel machines.

Christer Weinigel: <wingel@cendio.se>

Christer has put together a patch which allows you to boot Linux with 'holes' in the physical memory. This can be used to eg. exclude the 15-16M range from use by Linux so you can put some memory mapped board in that region.