Some time ago was a day when I reached “ten” years at Linaro. Why “”? Because it was 3 + 7 rather than 10 years straight. First three years as Canonical contractor now seven years at Red Hat employee assigned as Member Engineer.
My first three years at Linaro
NewCo or NewCore? Or Ubuntu on ARM?
In 2010 I signed contract with Canonical as “Foundation OS Engineer”. Once there I signed another paper which moved me to NewCo project (also called NewCore but NewCo name is on paper I signed).
On 30th April 2010 I got “Welcome to Linaro” e-mail.
Then UDS-M happened where we were hiding under “Ubuntu on Arm” name (despite the fact that Ubuntu had such team).
Ah, it is Linaro now :D
On 3rd June 2010 Linaro was officially announced. No more hiding, we went public with name.
My team
I became a part of Developer Platform team and worked mostly on toolchain packages for Ubuntu and later Debian. There were funny moments at sprints/summits/connects when I joked that I have two managers to listen to (one from Toolchain Working Group and one from Developer Platform).
There were Debian/Ubuntu developers there and people from other environments.
At some moment it was renamed to “Base and Baselines”. Or “Bed and Breakfast” as most of time “BB” was used instead of full name.
AArch64 bring up
In 2012 I dusted off my OpenEmbedded knowledge and started working on getting AArch64 architecture bring up. Lot of not-yet-public patches was in use. The fun of seeing “Hello world!” message in emulator printed by OS image I built from scratch was something I hope to never forget.
Each time I am choosing mug for my coffee I see Pac-Man one I bought during Linaro/Arm AArch64 sprint we had in October 2012.
The End
There was lot of noise in 2011 about deal between Canonical and Linaro. Several engineers at Linaro were from Canonical and there was some messy situation related with money.
It ended with retiring of people every quarter. Some moved back to Canonical, some changed job and got hired directly by Linaro. There were also people who moved to Linaro member companies and stayed with their Linaro position. Some people left both companies and went to other jobs.
I was supposed to leave Linaro in 2012 but it was postponed by half a year. So I left after about 37 months.
Second round
Time passed, I was working at Red Hat on getting AArch64 first class citizen in RHEL and Fedora Linux distributions. And one day my manager asked do I want to work at Linaro again.
I did some research, discussed with friends at Linaro and on 8th April 2016 I was back.
My team II
This time I became part of LEG: Linaro Enterprise Group. Servers, data centres etc. There were several teams to choose and I ended in SDI (Software Defined Infrastructure) one. We were behind LDC (Linaro Developer Cloud) project.
At some moment LEG became LDCG (Linaro Datacenter and Cloud Group). Some years later LDCG lost “and Cloud” part as AWS and other cloud providers started offering AArch64 systems so we did not had to deal with it any more.
OpenStack all over
First version of LDC was Debian based with OpenStack ‘liberty’. Then were weird months when we had to reinvent deployment several times. It was mess most of time.
So we abandoned own solutions and went with OpenStack Kolla. I quickly became one of core developers there. LDC moved to be container based.
In 2022 we ended working on OpenStack. LDC is now used only for internal projects.
Building stuff
With my “give me software and I will build it” mantra I ended also as kind of CI jobs developer for LEG teams. Apache Bigtop, Apache Arrow, TensorFlow, EDK2 and several other projects. Some used containers, some were running shell scripts, some Ansible.
SBSA Reference Platform
I was involved in some work around getting QEMU to emulate SBSA Reference Platform (“sbsa-ref” machine). Created some CI jobs to run test suites, build firmware images etc. After running test suites I created a bunch of issues in Jira so we can track how things go.
During recent months I became more involved. I am testing patches, running them through both SBSA and BSA Arm Compliance Suites and reporting results.
I have own set of scripts to handle logs to make it easier to track how things are now.
Summary
At last Linaro Connect events there was always a moment when they announced people who worked at Linaro for 5 (or later) 10 years. I have to admit — I felt envy several times.
And when I was 5 years straight at Linaro we had COVID-19 pandemic so there was no event.