Shuah Khan | |
---|---|
Occupation | Software Engineer |
Employer | Linux Foundation |
Website | www |
Shuah Khan is an American software engineer recognized for her contributions to the Linux kernel. In 2019, she became the first female Linux Foundation Fellow, joining notable figures such as Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman as the third fellow at the time. [1] [2] [3]
Born in India, [1] Khan obtained a bachelor's degree in Electronic engineering and a master's degree in computer science from Colorado State University. [3] After completing her education, she worked at Bell Labs, followed by 13 years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and 5 years at Samsung. [1] [4]
Khan made her first contribution to the Linux kernel in 2011, [1] by adding a new device driver for the LED sub-system as part of the Android Driver Mainlining effort. [5]
Khan has served on the Linux Technical Advisory Board (TAB) [6] [1] [5] and as chair of the ELISA Project Technical Steering Committee. [7] As of October 2024, she maintains the Kernel Selftest (kselftest) framework, the USB over IP driver, the CPU power monitoring subsystem, and the Virtual Media Controller driver. [8] She has significantly contributed to kselftest, a regression testing suite for the Linux kernel. [9] [4]
In the early stages, testing in the kernel was mostly limited to build and boot tests. Khan introduced a more comprehensive testing framework to detect regressions earlier, before they could impact users. Her efforts resulted in "kselftest," which enables developers to run sanity tests and ensure the stability of their changes. [9] This framework is now integrated into KernelCI and the 0-day test service. [10] Describing herself as a generalist, she has also contributed to the media subsystem by working on the Media Controller Device Allocator API to solve shared device resource management problems across different subsystems. [11]
In 2020, Khan provided a "Signed-off-by" tag for a patch recommending inclusive terminology in the Linux kernel. [12] This change was approved and merged by Linus Torvalds. [13] [14] The patch advised developers to avoid terms such as "master," "slave," "blacklist," and "whitelist." [12] [15] Alternatives such as primary/secondary, denylist/allowlist, and blocklist/passlist are suggested. [13]
Khan also leads the Community Bridge Program, which aims to empower open-source developers by providing tools for funding, improving security, and promoting diversity. [1] She advocates for increasing the participation of women in the kernel community. [11]
Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish and American software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. He also created the distributed version control system Git.
The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project implementation of the C standard library. It provides a wrapper around the system calls of the Linux kernel and other kernels for application use. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++. It was started in the 1980s by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU operating system.
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The Linux kernel mailing list (LKML) is the main electronic mailing list for Linux kernel development, where the majority of the announcements, discussions, debates, and flame wars over the kernel take place. Many other mailing lists exist to discuss the different subsystems and ports of the Linux kernel, but LKML is the principal communication channel among Linux kernel developers. It is a very high-volume list, usually receiving about 1,000 messages each day, most of which are kernel code patches.
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, sigreturn
, read
and write
to already-open file descriptors. Should it attempt any other system calls, the kernel will either just log the event or terminate the process with SIGKILL or SIGSYS. In this sense, it does not virtualize the system's resources but isolates the process from them entirely.
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This article documents the version history of the Linux kernel.
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Signed-off-by: Shuah Khan
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