Some time ago I was informed that Red Hat will not prolong membership for Linaro DataCentre Group. Which for me means end of my 2nd adventure with Linaro.
Third time???
I was in Linaro from April 2010 to end of May 2013 and then from April 2016 to end of current month. So two times.
But I was leaving Linaro twice in past. First in October 2012 when someone decided that it is not the time yet for me to go. And then in May 2013 when I finally left.
The work
Those eight and half years of Linaro work were a good time.
OpenStack
First we were doing OpenStack. Went from “needs hacks” to be ready out of the box for use. During 6 years I did hundreds of patches and countless reviews.
In meantime cloud providers started providing Arm instances and pressure to keep OpenStack working became smaller. Why maintain whole infrastructure when you can rent virtual one?
Part of that jobs was extending CirrOS images to behave properly on UEFI systems (AArch64 and x86-64). Defined CI jobs, handled migration to Github and helped with several releases.
There was some work done on distribution images as well.
SBSA Reference Platform
Then moved to SBSA Reference Platform. This was interesting in the beginning. I had a feeling of being more of a manager than developer. Had to collect ideas from everyone who worked on it and get something working and being acceptable by upstream.
This ended as internal versioning of platform and then we started adding more
features and upgrading platform whenever something interesting landed in QEMU.
Now sbsa-ref uses Neoverse-N2 cpu by default, can be used with NUMA setup,
have defined cpu topology and more.
Learnt firmware stuff (TF-A, EDK2), reviewed countless patches etc.
Too bad that during those years I was not able to buy any SBSA compliant hardware below 2000 EUR :(
Continuous Integration
One of my tasks during whole Linaro time was handling Continuous Integration. Defining new jobs, taking care of old ones, maintaining machines we used as Jenkins runners.
This took me into interesting places. There was a lot of Python. I even managed
to be involved in manylinux images used to build Python packages.
What’s next?
I am moving back to Red Hat. There are some positions open where I may fit so have to take a look and choose.