Theodore Yue Tak Ts'o (Chinese: 曹子德; born 1968) is an American software engineer mainly known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, in particular his contributions to file systems. He is the secondary developer and maintainer of e2fsprogs, the userspace utilities for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems, and is a maintainer for the ext4 file system.
Biography
Ts'o graduated from MIT with a degree in computer science in 1990, after which he worked in MIT's Information Systems (IS) department until 1999. During this time he was project leader of the Kerberos team.
In 1994, Ts'o created the /dev/randomLinux device node and the corresponding kernel driver, which was Linux's (and Unix's) first kernel interface that provided high-quality cryptographic random numbers to user programs.[1]/dev/random works without access to a hardware random number generator, allowing user programs to depend upon its existence. Separate daemons such as rngd take random numbers from such hardware and make them accessible via /dev/random.[2] Since its creation, interface /dev/random is used in Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Solaris systems.[3]
After MIT IS, Ts'o went to work for VA Linux Systems for two years. In late 2001 he joined IBM, where he worked on improvements in the Linux kernel's performance and scalability. After working on a real-time kernel at IBM, Ts'o joined the Linux Foundation in late 2007 for a two-year fellowship. He initially served as Chief Platform Strategist,[4] before becoming Chief Technology Officer in 2008.[5] Ts'o also served as Treasurer for USENIX until 2008, and has chaired the annual Linux Kernel Developers Summit.
In 2010 Ts'o moved to Google,[6] saying he would be working on "kernel, file system, and storage stuff".[7]
^"Linux Kernel Developer Ted Ts'o Joins Linux Foundation as Chief Platform Strategist". The Linux Foundation. December 4, 2007. Retrieved 21 September 2018. The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Linux kernel filesystem maintainer Ted Ts'o is joining the organization as a Fellow and chief platform strategist.
^"Ted T'so moves to Google". The H Open. 14 January 2010. Retrieved 21 September 2018. Theodore 'Ted' T'so has moved to Google, leaving his position as Linux Foundation's Chief Technology Officer.
^"Proud to be a Googler". Retrieved 14 January 2010. I'm going to be working on kernel, file system, and storage stuff. Ext4 will definitely be one of the first things I'll be working on, See: Michael Rubin (4 January 2010). "Re: [Jfs-discussion] benchmark results". lists.openwall.net.