Robert Love: Right now most of my time
is going into maintaining the preemptible kernel patch . This patch
allows a lower priority process to be preempted, even if operating
in kernel space, resulting in improved system response. The patch
was originally the work of MontaVista - a great company - so I am
working closely with them and the rest of the community. It is a
fun project. We are aiming for inclusion in 2.5.
I'm pretty random, otherwise.. I fix bugs, optimize, and clean
cruft up. I wrote the i815 and AMD761 AGP GART code. I also
maintain some other odds and end patches.
...The model we use is to allow the kernel to be preempted at
any time when it is not locked. Under this design, when an event
occurs that causes a higher priority task to become runnable, the
system preempt the current task and run the higher priority
task.