Cox, Gleixner, Ts’o Elected to Technical Advisory Board

Besides excellent sessions and networking opportunities, there’s usually behind-the-scenes action going on at our many events: meetings and get-togethers for any one, and sometimes several, of our working groups and teams. The Linux Foundation (LF) staff and members are scattered around the world, so using our events for valuable face time is a necessity.

One of the more important functions is the annual Technical Advisory Board (TAB) election, which was held this year at the Japan Linux Symposium in Tokyo. Today, we’ve announced the results of that election.

If you’re not familiar with the TAB, this 10-member board consists of members of Linux kernel community who are annually elected by their peers to serve staggered, two-year terms. The TAB collaborates with the LF on programs and issues that affect the Linux community, and the TAB Chair also sits on the LF board.

It is often perceived that the Foundation uses TAB to influence the Linux kernel community, when actually it’s the other way around: TAB typically advises the LF, giving us important guidance on what’s happening with the Linux kernel so our membership can better react to the technical changes and advances.

For the 2009 election, there are three new members of TAB:

• Alan Cox, employed by Intel SSG and manager of major Linux projects such as the original Linux SMP implementation, the Linux Mac68K port and an experimental 16bit Linux subset port to the 8086.
• Thomas Gleixner, who manages bug reports for NAND FLASH, core timers and the unified x86 architecture.
• Ted Ts‚Äôo, the first North American Linux kernel developer and Linux Foundation fellow. Ted was also voted as the new Vice Chair.

Re-elected for two-year terms are Jon Corbet, Linux kernel developer, editor of LWN, and author of the Linux Kernel Weather Report, and Greg Kroah-Hartman, employed by Novell and kernel maintainer for the –stable branch as well as manager of the Linux Device Driver Project.

The other five TAB members, who are serving the remainder of their two-year terms include:

• James Bottomley, Novell distinguished engineer and Linux Kernel maintainer of the SCSI subsystem, the Linux Voyager port and the 53c700 driver.
• Kristen Carlson Accardi, kernel developer at Intel and contributor to the ACPI, PCI, and SATA subsystems.
• Chris Mason, Oracle Kernel development team and creator of the Btrfs file system
• Dave Jones, maintainer of the Fedora kernel at Red Hat
• Chris Wright, employed by Red Hat, maintainer for the LSM framework, and co-maintainer of the -stable Linux kernel tree.

As you can see, each member of TAB is a valuable kernel contributor, so they know what’s going on in the kernel at a level that’s dizzying to most folks. The LF is very lucky to have such expertise to advise and guide us, and as always, we thank the TAB members for their valuable service.