Hans Peter Anvin (born 12 January 1972), also known as hpa, is a Swedish-American computer programmer who has contributed to

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

projects. Anvin is the originator of SYSLINUX, Linux Assigned Names and Numbers Authority (LANANA), and various

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 ...

features.

History

Peter Anvin grew up in

Västerås Västerås () is a city in central Sweden on the shore of Mälaren, Lake Mälaren in the province of Västmanland, west of Stockholm. The city had a population of 127,799 at the end of 2019, out of the municipal total of 158,653, over 100,000 mo ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

. He moved to the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

in 1988, as a teenager, when his father moved to

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

. Anvin was previously maintainer of the ''linux.*''

Usenet newsgroup A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are not only discussion groups or conversations, but also a repository to publish articles, start ...

hierarchy and the Linux kernel archives at kernel.org, wrote the original

Swap Space In computer operating systems, memory paging is a memory management scheme that allows the physical memory used by a program to be non-contiguous. This also helps avoid the problem of memory fragmentation and requiring compaction to reduce fra ...

How-to How to or how-to (among other spellings) may refer to: * A user guide ** An owner's manual, more narrowly * A tutorial ** Especially, instructional material created for the do it yourself market In titles of specific works * How to... (film serie ...

, and the "Linux/I386 Boot Protocol" (file: linux/Documentation/i386/boot.txt) Peter Anvin graduated in 1994 from

Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...

, where he also was president of the Northwestern Amateur Radio Society (W9BGX); his

amateur radio Amateur radio, also known as ham radio, is the use of the radio frequency radio spectrum, spectrum for purposes of non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, private recreation, radiosport, contesting, and emer ...

call sign is AD6QZ (formerly N9ITP). According to his personal web site, he is a believer in the

Baháʼí Faith The Baháʼí Faith is a religion founded in the 19th century that teaches the Baháʼí Faith and the unity of religion, essential worth of all religions and Baháʼí Faith and the unity of humanity, the unity of all people. Established by ...

. In addition to his regular employment at Intel's Open Source Technology Center, Anvin was a long-time co-maintainer of the unified x86/x86-64 Linux kernel tree, chief maintainer of the

Netwide Assembler The Netwide Assembler (NASM) is an assembler and disassembler for the Intel x86 architecture. It can be used to write 16-bit, 32-bit (IA-32) and 64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are ...

(NASM) and SYSLINUX projects. Previous employers include

Transmeta Transmeta Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. It developed low power x86 compatible microprocessors based on a VLIW core and a software layer called Code Morphing Software. Code Morphing ...

, where he performed as architect and technical director; Orion Multisystems, working on CPU architecture and code morphing software; and

rPath In computer science, rpath designates the run-time search path hard-coded in an executable file or library. Dynamic linking loaders use the rpath to find required libraries. Specifically, it encodes a path to shared libraries into the header ...

Linux kernel works

* UNIX98 ptys *

CPUID In the x86 architecture, the CPUID instruction (identified by a CPUID opcode) is a processor supplementary instruction (its name derived from " CPU Identification") allowing software to discover details of the processor. It was introduced by Int ...

driver *The Linux kernel

automounter An automounter is any program or software facility which automatically mount (computing), mounts filesystems in response to access operations by user programs. An automounter system utility (Daemon (computer software), daemon under Unix), when not ...

*zisofs *

RAID 6 In computer storage, the standard RAID levels comprise a basic set of RAID ("redundant array of independent disks" or "redundant array of inexpensive disks") configurations that employ the techniques of striping, mirroring, or parity to create la ...

support *

x32 ABI The x32 ABI is an application binary interface (ABI) and one of the interfaces of the Linux kernel. The x32 ABI provides 32-bit integers, long and pointers ( ILP32) on Intel and AMD 64-bit hardware. The ABI allows programs to take advantage of the ...

klibc In computing, klibc is a minimalistic subset of the standard C library developed by H. Peter Anvin. It was developed mainly to be used during the Linux startup process, and it is part of the early user space, i.e. components used during kernel s ...

– a minimalistic subset of the

standard C library The C standard library, sometimes referred to as libc, is the standard library for the C programming language, as specified in the ISO C standard.ISO/ IEC (2018). '' ISO/IEC 9899:2018(E): Programming Languages - C §7'' Starting from the origin ...

References

;General
Linux kernel traffic quotes: H. Peter Anvin
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Anvin, H. Peter Swedish computer programmers Free software programmers Linux kernel programmers People from Västerås People from San Jose, California 1972 births Living people 20th-century Bahá'ís 21st-century Bahá'ís Intel people Amateur radio people Northwestern University alumni