Werner Almesberger (born 13 August 1967) is an

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

computer programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a progr ...

and an

open-source hardware Open-source hardware (OSH, OSHW) consists of physical artifact (software development), artifacts of technology designed and offered by the open-design movement. Both free and open-source software (FOSS) and open-source hardware are created by th ...

designer/maker. He is mainly known as a

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hackersomeone with knowledge of bug (computing), bugs or exp ...

of the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

. Contributions to Linux (

projects) include the LILO boot loader, the initial RAM disk (

initrd In Linux systems, initrd (''initial ramdisk'') is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, to be used as part of the Linux startup process. initrd and initramfs (from INITial RAM File System) refer to two different methods ...

), the MS-DOS file system, much of the ATM code, the traffic control configurator, the UML-based simulator umlsim, and the

Openmoko Openmoko is a discontinued project to create a family of mobile phones that are open source, including the hardware specification, the operating system (Openmoko Linux), and actual smartphone development implementation like the Neo 1973 and Neo ...

(a version of Linux for completely open, low-cost, high-volume phones).

Involvement in the Linux kernel

While a PhD student in Communications at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) he did contributions to several key pieces in the early days of the Linux kernel, in particular as developer of DOS file system, LILO bootloader (the most used Linux bootloader during the youth of the Linux kernel project) and

initial RAM disk.

Differentiated Services on Linux

Werner Almesberger wrote the code to support

differentiated services Differentiated services or DiffServ is a computer networking architecture that specifies a mechanism for classifying and managing network traffic and providing quality of service (QoS) on modern IP networks. DiffServ can, for example, be used t ...

on Linux.

Linux ATM

Almesberger was the leader of the

asynchronous transfer mode Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a telecommunications standard defined by the American National Standards Institute and International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T, formerly CCITT) for digital trans ...

network on Linux project, which has been part of the Linux system since 1995.

Openmoko

Werner Almesberger was a system architect for

, the first project to create a smartphone platform using free software. It used the

, with a graphical user environment which uses

X.Org Server X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System (X11) display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation. Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of ''X11 libraries'', which ...

, and the

Matchbox A matchbox is a container or case for matches, made of paperboard, cardboard, thin wood, or metal, generally in the form of a box with a separate drawer sliding inside the cover. Matchboxes generally measure 5 x 3.5 x 1.5 cm, and commonly have ...

window manager. The project also released full schematics of the open phone design.

Recent work

Almesberger contributes as the architect of several

open source hardware Open-source hardware (OSH, OSHW) consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered by the open-design movement. Both free and open-source software (FOSS) and open-source hardware are created by this open-source culture movemen ...

Qi hardware Qi Hardware is an organization which produces copyleft hardware and software, in an attempt to apply the Free Software Foundation's GNU GPL concept of copylefting software to the hardware layer by using the CC BY-SA license for schematics, bill of ...

community projects, like implementing an

IEEE 802.15.4 IEEE 802.15.4 is a technical standard that defines the operation of a low-rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN). It specifies the physical layer and media access control for LR-WPANs, and is maintained by the IEEE 802.15 working group, ...

subsystem for

Ben NanoNote The Ben NanoNote (officially the 本 NanoNote)Melanson, Donald"Qi Hardware's tiny, hackable Ben NanoNote now shipping" ''Engadget'', 15 March 2010 (accessed 1 November 2012) is a pocket computer using the Linux-based OpenWrt operating system. An ...

made up of two boards. In 2013 he started developing th
Anelok
password safe and, in 2014, h
joined the Neo900 open smartphone project
where he assists on a broad range of technical and related issues, and he now divides his time between these two projects.

Life

He lives in Argentina, doing trips around the world from time to time, for talks in conferences (like being keynote speaker at

Linux Symposium The Linux Symposium was a Linux and open source conference held annually in Canada from 1999 to 2014. The conference was initially named Ottawa Linux Symposium and was held only in Ottawa, but was renamed after being held in other cities in Canada ...

in 2008), and for hardware and software work.

References

External links

Werner Almesberger: Past Projects

2.4 kernel: Always on the go with contributor Werner Almesberger
(interview)

ATM on Linux

Differentiated Services on Linux
{{DEFAULTSORT:Almesberger, Werner 1967 births Living people Linux kernel programmers