Arjan van de Ven's homepage

Work
I am working for Intel International BV since January 23rd, 2006. I work in the Open Source Technology Center (OTC) where my group is responsible for making sure that Linux works well on Intels leading Chipset and Processor products.


Linux
I've been working on Linux things for the last 10 years or so, and I've done projects regarding performance, power usage, security and many other things.

Security

I'm one of people behind the ExecShield project (wikipedia link, Red Hat Magazine article), a project started at Red Hat that had the goal of putting up as high a possible threshold as possible against automated worms and virus attacks in a general purpose distribution kernel.

On November 9th, 2005 I gave a presentation on this topic at the Linux World expo in Utrecht; the presentation (in Dutch) can be downloaded here.

Filesystems

Linux is slowly but steadily running towards a huge brick wall with it's filesystems. The EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 family is the most used filesystem on Linux, and shines through it's simplicity and robustness, but there are some serious issues when disks go to be 1 terabyte or more in size: the time it takes to run the fsck program on your filesystem grows to impractical times (days or even weeks). Other filesystems in Linux can cope with such large disks a little better in terms of performance or inherent scalability, but they all suffer from the fsck crunch.

Irqbalance

I'm the author of the linux irqbalance program, a daemon that distributes the work that the Linux kernel needs to do for its interrupt processing over the various cpus in your system: This optimizes performance or power usage.

PowerTOP

I'm the author of the PowerTOP program, a tool that shows which programs are keeping your system out of power saving modes.

Timechart

I'm the author of the timechart perf subsystem, a tool that shows which and where time is spent on a system wide level.

Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit

Linux is not Windows. This means that Linux sometimes uses the BIOS services differently than Windows does, even if both are within the specification. Unfortunately, many BIOS teams in hardware companies work via a "Windows XP boots, ship it!" methodology, which gives Linux sometimes some serious headaches

In all honesty, Linux is often as much to blame as the BIOS, and it was also not easy to actually test Linux. Think about it: a person who is totally unfamiliar with Linux would need weeks of training to really understand if Linux works well on the BIOS he is supposed to be testing!

To fix at least our half of these issues, I started the Linux-ready Firmware Developer Kit, a tool for BIOS vendors to do a "10 minute" check of their BIOS with Linux. At this point I know that Dell, HP and IBM have stated publicly that they are using this toolkit internally already.



TomTom navigator
When I joined Intel International BV, I was facing a pretty steep commute to the office in Schiphol-Rijk, with lots of really bad traffic between my house and the office. I decided to purchase a TomTom Navigator GO 300 GPS navigation device. In part because it's from a dutch company with good local maps, but most and for all, because it runs Linux internally and the TomTom company contributed several of the tools under the GPL license.

The TomTom device has the capability to connect via Bluetooth to the internet to get the latest traffic information; since my mobile phone a the time lacked Bluetooth I wrote a a HOWTO on how to connect a TomTom GO to the internet via a linux laptop/pc and a Bluetooth dongle.

At some point I wanted to write a traffic-predicting proxy server for my TomTom, but after I got a new job and a new phone I lost interest in this project.



About me
I studied Electrical Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology where I got my MSc in January 1999. Since then I have worked at Oce Technologies, Red Hat UK and Red Hat GMBH and am currently working for Intel International BV.

In December 2006, I also graduated for a part time MBA at TiasNimbas, which is a business school which is run in cooperation with Tilburg University and Eindhoven University of Technology.

I have an INTP personality type, and am otherwise rather Dutch in the way I work with people, which means I can be very direct and process/result oriented.

If you want to contact me, please use arjan@infradead.org as email address.

picture of arjan


Cool stuff my friends do
  • Val Henson is a bright kernel hacker who's mostly working on filesystem technologies and large page support. She also used to work at Intel, in the same group I work in. Val has much more cool stuff on her homepage than I will ever have here so I can't imagine why you're still reading this page.
  • Rolla Selbak is working with me at Intel on the Linux-ready Firmware Developer kit and basically runs the entire project nowadays.
  • Three of my fellow MBA students have started their own company: Misdaadkaart.nl. Their company uses Google maps to overlay crime data from various sources into a comprehensive "is my neighborhood unsafe" website.
Ramblings
I've linked to some documents I wrote here: