Ted T’so, the chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation, has moved on to start a new career at Google. T’so had been the CTO at the Linux Foundation for the past two years and as such, the move was not unexpected.
“Ted’s fellowship at the Linux Foundation was a two-year assignment and was completed in December,” Jim Zemlin, executive director, the Linux Foundation said in an email sent to InternetNews.com. “It is similar to the fellowships held by Andrew Morton, Andrew Tridgell and Markus Rex.”
Rex was T’so immediate predecessor in the role of CTO of the Linux Foundation. He has since moved back to Novell, where he helps to run all of Novell’s Linux and open source efforts.
Though T’so has left the Linux Foundation, like Rex, he’s not leaving the Linux community.
“Ted’s contribution to the Linux Foundation can’t be overestimated and we look forward to his ongoing contributions to the community through his work at Google,” Zemlin said.
Among the tasks that T’so is working on at Google is the migration to the next generation Ext4 filesystem.
“I’m going to be working on kernel, file system, and storage stuff. Ext4 will definitely be one of the first things I’ll be working on,” T’so wrote in a blog post.
Ext4 is the successor to the Ext3 filesystem which had been a common Linux filesystem choice for many Linux distributions until recently. Red Hat’s Fedora community Linux distribution as well as Ubuntu and other have now began adopting Ext4.
In Google’s case, they had systems on the older Ext2 filesystem, which they are now migrating to Ext4
“The driving performance reason to upgrade is that while Ext2 had been ‘good enough’ for a very long time, the metadata arrangement on a stale file system was leading to what we call ‘read inflation’, ” Google developer Michael Rubin wrote in a mailing list post. “This is where we end up doing many seeks to read one block of data. In general, latency from poor block allocation was causing performance hiccups.”
For the Linux Foundation, the position of CTO is now open.
“We’re always looking for the best technical talent to join us at the Linux Foundation, and will fill the CTO position when we determine the most natural candidate for the coming years,” Zemlin said.
As luck would have it, the Linux Foundation just announced a new Linux job board, which might just help them in their search too.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
