Werner Almesberger


Werner Almesberger is an Austrian free software computer programmer and an open-source hardware designer/maker. He is mainly known as a hacker of the Linux kernel.
Contributions to Linux include the LILO boot loader, the initial RAM disk, the MS-DOS file system, much of the ATM code, the tcng traffic control configurator, the UML-based simulator umlsim, and the Openmoko.

Involvement in the Linux kernel

While a PhD student in Communications at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne he did contributions to several key pieces in the early days of the Linux kernel, in particular as developer of DOS file system, LILO bootloader
and initrd initial RAM disk.

Differentiated Services on Linux

Werner Almesberger wrote the code to support Differentiated Services on Linux.

Linux ATM

Almesberger was the leader of the Asynchronous Transfer Mode network on Linux project, which is nowadays part of the Linux system since 1995.

Openmoko

Werner Almesberger was a System Architect for Openmoko, the first project to create a smartphone platform using free software. It used the Linux kernel, with a graphical user environment which uses X.Org Server, and the Matchbox window manager. The project also released full schematics of the open phone design.

Recent work

Nowadays he contributes as the architect of several open source hardware Qi hardware community projects, like
implementing an IEEE 802.15.4 subsystem for Ben Nanonote made up of two boards.
In 2013 he started developing the password safe and, in 2014, he where he assists on a broad range of technical and related issues, and he now divides his time between these two projects.

Life

He lives in Argentina, doing trips around the world from time to time, for talks in conferences, and for hardware and software work.