Con Kolivas is a Greek-Australian
anaesthetist
Anesthesiology, anaesthesiology or anaesthesia is the medical specialty concerned with the total perioperative care of patients before, during and after surgery. It encompasses anesthesia, intensive care medicine, critical emergency medicine, a ...
.
[Anaesthesia Information Page]
by Kolivas, Jan 2001 He has worked as a
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 ...
on 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 ...
and on the development of the cryptographic currency mining software CGMiner.
[CGMiner GitHub repository, "ASIC and FPGA miner in c for bitcoin"]
/ref> His Linux contributions include patches for the kernel to improve its desktop
A desktop traditionally refers to:
* The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor)
Desktop may refer to various compu ...
performance, particularly reducing I/O impact.
Linux
Kolivas is most notable for his work with CPU scheduling, most significantly his implementation of " fair scheduling", which inspired Ingo Molnár
Ingo Molnár, employed by Red Hat as of May 2013, is a Hungary, Hungarian Linux Hacker culture, hacker. He is known for his contributions to the operating system in terms of Computer security, security and Computer performance, performance.
Li ...
to develop his Completely Fair Scheduler
The Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) was a process scheduler that was merged into the 2.6.23 (October 2007) release of the Linux Linux kernel, kernel. It was the default scheduler of the tasks of the SCHED_NORMAL class (i.e., tasks that have no re ...
, as a replacement for the earlier O(1) scheduler, crediting Kolivas in his announcement.[, 18 April 2007, ''KernelTrap.org''] Kolivas developed several CPU schedulers such as the Staircase in 2004, then Rotating Staircase Deadline (RSDL), and subsequently Staircase Deadline (SD) schedulers to address interactivity
Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but ...
concerns of the Linux kernel with respect to desktop computing. Additionally, he has written a " swap prefetch" patch, which allows process
A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic.
Things called a process include:
Business and management
* Business process, activities that produce a specific s ...
es to respond quickly after the operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
has been idle for some time and their working set
Working set is a concept in computer science which defines the amount of memory that a process (computing), process requires in a given time interval.
Definition
Peter_J._Denning, Peter Denning (1968) defines "the working set of information W(t ...
s have been swapped out. Many of his experimental "-CK" patches, such as his prefetching and scheduling code, did not get merged with the official Linux kernel.
In 2007, Kolivas announced in an email that he would cease developing for the Linux kernel. Discussing his reasons in an interview, he expressed frustration with aspects of the mainline kernel development process, which he felt did not give sufficient priority to desktop interactivity, in addition to hacking taking a toll on his health, work and family.scheduler
A schedule (, ) or a timetable, as a basic time-management tool, consists of a list of times at which possible tasks, events, or actions are intended to take place, or of a sequence of events in the chronological order in which such things ...
called BFS ( Brain Fuck Scheduler). It is designed for desktop use and to be very simple (hence it may not scale well to machines with many CPU cores). Con Kolivas did not intend to get it merged into the mainline kernel.BFS FAQ
/ref> He has since retired BFS in favour of MuQSS, a rewritten implementation of the same concept.
CGMiner
On 13 July 2011, Kolivas introduced a new piece of software for "windows, linux, OSX and other" called CGMiner, which is used for mining cryptocurrencies
A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.
Individual coin ownership records ...
such as bitcoin
Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is the first Decentralized application, decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under ...
and Litecoin
Litecoin (Abbreviation: LTC; sign: Ł) is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Inspired by Bitcoin, Litecoin was the second cryptocurrency starting in October 2011. In te ...
.
References
External links
Kolivas's personal website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kolivas, Con
Australian people of Greek descent
Australian computer programmers
Australian anaesthetists
Linux kernel programmers
Medical doctors from Melbourne
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)