David Stephen Miller (born November 26, 1974) is an American

software developer Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, Computer programming, programming, software documentation, documenting, software testing, testing, and Software bugs, bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applic ...

working on the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

, where he is the primary maintainer of the networking subsystem and individual networking drivers, the

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed ...

implementation, and the IDE subsystem. With other people, he co-maintains the crypto API, KProbes,

IPsec In computing, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in ...

, and is also involved in other development work. He is also a founding member of the

GNU Compiler Collection The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is an optimizing compiler produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages, hardware architectures and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free software ...

steering committee.

Work

As of January 2022, Miller is #1 in "non-author signoff" patches, which are Linux kernel modifications reviewed by the subsystem maintainer who ultimately applies them. He's been in the top gatekeepers for years since kernel 2.6.22 in 2007. He worked at the

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

Center for Advanced Information Processing, at Cobalt Microserver, and then

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

since 1999.

SPARC porting

Miller

ported In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

the Linux kernel to the

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

in 1996 with

Miguel de Icaza Miguel de Icaza (born November 23, 1972) is a Mexican programmer, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects. Biography Early years De Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied Mathematics at the National Autonomous Universit ...

. He has also ported Linux to the 64-bit

UltraSPARC The UltraSPARC is a microprocessor developed by Sun Microsystems and fabricated by Texas Instruments, introduced in mid-1995. It is the first microprocessor from Sun to implement the 64-bit SPARC V9 instruction set architecture (ISA). Marc Trembl ...

machines, including

UltraSPARC T1 Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor, known until its 14 November 2005 announcement by its development codename "Niagara", is a multithreading, multicore CPU. Designed to lower the energy consumption of server computers, the CPU ty ...

in early 2006 and later the T2 and T2+. he continues to maintain the sparc port (both 32-bit and 64-bit). In April 2008, Miller contributed the SPARC port of

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile met ...

, a from-scratch rewrite of the

GNU linker In computing, a linker or link editor is a computer system program that takes one or more object files (generated by a compiler or an assembler) and combines them into a single executable file, library file, or another "object" file. A simpler ...

Linux networking

Miller is one of the maintainers of the Linux

TCP/IP stack The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

and has been key in improving its performance in high load environments. He also wrote and/or contributed to numerous

network card A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter or physical network interface, and by similar terms) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. Ear ...

drivers in the Linux kernel.

eBPF

Miller is currently working on Linux's dynamic tracing technology, called

eBPF eBPF (often aliased BPF) is a technology that can run sandboxed programs in a privileged context such as the operating system kernel. It is used to safely and efficiently extend the capabilities of the kernel at runtime without requiring to chan ...

Speeches

David delivered the keynote at netdev 0.1 on February 16, 2015, in

Ottawa Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...

. He also delivered the keynote at

Ottawa Linux Symposium The Linux Symposium was a Linux and Open Source conference held annually in Canada from 1999 to 2014. The conference was initially named Ottawa Linux Symposium and was held only in Ottawa, but was renamed after being held in other cities in Canada ...

in 2000, and another keynote at

Linux.conf.au linux.conf.au (often abbreviated as lca) is Australasia's regional Linux and Open Source conference. It is a roaming conference, held in a different Australian or New Zealand city every year, coordinated by Linux Australia and organised by lo ...

Dunedin Dunedin ( ; mi, Ōtepoti) is the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand (after Christchurch), and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from , the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Th ...

in January 2006. He gave a talk on "Multiqueue Networking Developments in the Linux Kernel" at the July 2009 meeting of the New York Linux Users Group.

References

External links

David S. Miller's Linux Networking HomepageDavid Miller's old blogDavid Miller Google+ page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Miller, David S. People from Seattle Linux kernel programmers American computer programmers 1974 births Living people Red Hat employees