Glauber Costa

Last updated
Glauber Costa
Glauber-Costa P99CONF.jpg
Born
Glauber de Oliveira Costa

1982 (age 4243)
Occupation(s)Co-founder, CEO, Software engineer
EmployerTurso
Known for Kernel-based Virtual Machine, ScyllaDB

Glauber Costa is a Canadian software engineer recognized for his contributions to high-performance systems software, including Linux kernel, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), the OSv unikernel, ScyllaDB, and Rust open source projects. Linus Torvalds recognized him as one of the top contributors to the Linux x86 subsystem. [1] Costa is currently the CEO and co-founder of Turso, reimplementation of the SQLite database in Rust. [2] [3] [4]

Contents

Career

Linux kernel and virtualization

Costa began his career working on the Linux kernel, with a focus on virtualization and resource isolation. In 2008 he was recognized in the Linux Foundation report "Who Writes Linux" as one of the most active contributors to the Linux Kernel. [5] In that same year, Linus Torvalds listed him among the top five committers to the x86 subsystem, alongside Ingo Molnár and Thomas Gleixner. [1] He was also recognized as the third most active 2.6.26 developers (by changeset). [6]

Costa has done significant work in the development of timekeeping primitives for the KVM hypervisor and developed parts of the memory cgroups subsystem, including early kernel memory accounting features. [7] [8]

In 2011, he implemented the first per-cgroup TCP buffer limits, extending the kernel's memory controller to account for kernel memory such as TCP socket buffers. [9] He later designed mechanisms to extend memory control groups to additional parts of kernel memory, work that underpinned container isolation in Linux. [10] Costa also proposed and prototyped cgroup-aware out-of-memory (OOM) handling, allowing policies such as killing all tasks within a memory-constrained cgroup rather than individual processes. [11]

Costa was a core contributor to Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and helped merge the KVM codebase into the upstream QEMU emulator. [12]

OSv

In 2013, Costa joined Cloudius Systems, where he co-developed OSv, an open source unikernel targeting cloud workloads. [13] The OSv design is described in the USENIX ATC 2014 paper "OSv: Optimizing the Operating System for Virtual Machines", a paper that Costa co-authored. [14]

ScyllaDB

Costa was part of the team that created ScyllaDB in 2014. He joined as a founding engineer and later advanced to VP of Field Engineering. [15] He contributed to the engine's open source Seastar framework, shard-per-core architecture, memory and I/O optimizations. [16]

Glommio

In 2020, while working at Datadog, Costa developed the Glommio open-source asynchronous Rust programming library. It uses a thread-per-core model and Linux's io_uring to support building highly parallel, low-latency applications on Linux. [17] [18] The project was released publicly by Datadog. [19]

Turso

In 2021, Costa co-founded Turso (initially ChiselStrike) along with Pekka Enberg. [2] [3] The company builds a distributed database that is a reimplementation of SQLite in Rust. Costa serves as the company's CEO. [4]

Publications

Costa has authored technical publications and open-source contributions throughout his career. Notably, he co-authored the research paper "OSv – Optimizing the Operating System for Virtual Machines" presented at USENIX ATC 2014, which detailed the unikernel approach taken by OSv. [14] Costa has also written technical articles on systems programming (for instance, on how io_uring and eBPF can revolutionize Linux programming). [20] Additionally, he has spoken at conferences such as USENIX, LinuxCon, KVM Forum, Xen Project Summit, and P99 CONF. [21] [22] [23] [24]

Patents

Costa has been granted patents for systems software and virtualization technologies: [25]

References

  1. 1 2 "git rebase". yarchive.net. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  2. 1 2 "Turso Offers Web Developers Simpler, Faster Database". The New Stack. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  3. 1 2 "Backend development platform startup ChiselStrike raises $7M". SiliconANGLE. 27 July 2022. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  4. 1 2 "tursodatabase/turso". GitHub. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  5. Greg Kroah-Hartman; Jonathan Corbet; Amanda McPherson. "Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It Is Going, Who Is Doing It, What They Are Doing, and Who Is Sponsoring It: An August 2009 Update" (PDF). The Linux Foundation. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  6. Jonathan Corbet (2 July 2008). "Some development statistics for 2.6.26 – and beyond". LWN.net. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  7. Glauber de Oliveira Costa (6 November 2007). "kvmclock implementation, the guest part". LKML. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  8. "memcontrol.c". Linux Kernel Git (glommer/memcg). Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  9. Jonathan Corbet (6 December 2011). "Per-cgroup TCP buffer limits". LWN.net. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  10. Jonathan Corbet (14 May 2013). "Smarter shrinkers". LWN.net. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  11. Jonathan Corbet (23 April 2013). "LSFMM: Improving the out-of-memory killer". LWN.net. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  12. "Features/KVM and QEMU merge". Fedora Project Wiki. 26 March 2009. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  13. "OSv: The Open Source Cloud Operating System That Is Not Linux". Linux Foundation. 14 November 2013. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  14. 1 2 Avi Kivity; Dor Laor; Glauber Costa; Pekka Enberg; Nadav Har'El; Don Marti; Vlad Zolotarov (June 2014). OSv — Optimizing the Operating System for Virtual Machines (PDF). Proceedings of the 2014 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  15. "Hybrid cloud rises as an avenue for data security and business continuity". ZDNet. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  16. Edwards, John (7 May 2020). "Storage and database innovation evolve in tandem". SearchStorage. TechTarget. Archived from the original on 10 August 2025. Retrieved 1 October 2025.
  17. "docs.rs – Rust crate documentation". docs.rs. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  18. "Announcing tokio-uring: io-uring support for Tokio". Tokio. 2021. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  19. "DataDog/glommio". GitHub. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  20. "How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux". The New Stack. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  21. "Resource Isolation: The Failure of Operating Systems & How We Can Fix It". LinuxCon Europe 2012 Schedule. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  22. "LinuxCon/CloudOpen North America 2016 Schedule" . Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  23. "USENIX ATC '14 – Speakers & Organizers" . Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  24. "OPW: The Xen Project Developer Summit". Xen Project. Retrieved 29 September 2025.
  25. "Glauber Costa – Patents". Google Patents. Retrieved 29 September 2025.

See Also