BSDCan2015 - ZI

BSDCan 2015
The Technical BSD Conference

Andrew Cagney

Andrew Cagney likes to fix things; sometimes successfully; and invariably the hard way.

Andrew's first encounter with open source and Kernels was MINIX 1.x; tutoring it to students, and creating the MINIX 1.5 patch kit. The patch kit proved a little too successful, at one point it was Australia's top international FTP site.

From there Andrew tried his hand at porting operating systems. The first was ChorusOS, working on both SMP SPARC and NS32K ports. Finding the ChorusOS embedded debugger lacking, he added the GNU dis-assembler and symbols (this was also Andrew's first encounter with GPL incompatibility). The next operating system port was meant to be NetBSD on the PowerPC. A lack of real hardware and a stable compiler meant Andrew instead wrote the "granddaddy of PowerPC emulation" - PSIM.

After that, Andrew spent time working on, and for a while, trying to maintain GDB. Among the more unusual successes with the GDB code base were the frame-unwinder (and "frame sniffers") and the MI protocol (even LLDB supports MI).

Most recently, Andrew's interest has been in letters such as GCM and NSS, and the number ~~4306~~ ~~5996~~ ~~7296~~ 7427.

Andrew is a member of the DWARF Workgroup.