Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 19 January 2010 23:51
Opinion and Analysis
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With its massive pool of programming talent, it is no wonder that India has taken pride of place among the countries competing to attract IT outsourcing.
Yet when it comes to free and open source software, one finds India lagging way behind - there are relatively few Indians involved in this genre of software.
And India, with its vast population, a considerable number of whom live in poverty, is one country that can really benefit from the uptake of free and open source software.
At Australia's national Linux conference, an Indian face is rare - unless it's of someone who's already settled abroad.
Bharata B. Rao, one of the speakers at the
11th LCA, is an exception - he has come to Wellington straight from Bangalore and is just recovering from the jetlag. (His
talk is titled "Using performance counters to optimize task placement on multi-core systems.")
Rao, who is in his mid-30s, works for IBM as a senior staff software engineer in the India Software Labs Systems Group. What's more, he writes code aimed at the Linux kernel.
After he joined IBM in 1999, he was part of a team which worked on a feature called Dynamic Probes, which allowed insertion of probe points at random points in the kernel and user applications to collect debug data.
"It was a serviceability tool to collect data for debugging kernel/application problems, but it never made it to the kernel," he said.
However a redesigned and trimmed version of Dynamic Probes, christened kprobes, was included in the kernel subsequently.
During the same time, Rao also worked on improving another open source project - Linux kernel crash dumps, used for post-mortem analysis of the kernel.
After about a year, he left IBM, Bangalore and joined Samsung, South Korea, where he worked on embedded technologies. He quit that job a year later due to personal reasons and joined HP, Bangalore.
At HP, he was part of a large team that contributed to the OpenSSI cluster project. He mainly did userspace bits in that project, got bored quickly and rejoined IBM about five years ago to get back to kernel programming.
"In the OpenSSI project, working in the userspace, I wasn't able to concentrate on one area and I didn't like it", he explained.
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