Theodore Yue Tak Ts'o | |
---|---|
Born | 1968 (age 48–49) Palo Alto, California |
Residence | Medford, Massachusetts |
Nationality | American |
Other names | Ted |
Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Occupation | computer scientist, free software developer |
Employer | |
Known for | Involvement in FOSS, e2fsprogs |
Awards | Award for the Advancement of Free Software |
Theodore Yue Tak Ts'o (曹子德) (born 1968) is a software engineer mainly known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, in particular his contributions to file systems. He is the primary developer and maintainer of e2fsprogs, the userspace utilities for the ext2, ext3 and ext4 filesystems, and is a maintainer for the ext4 file system.
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 V5 team.
In 1994, Ts'o created the /dev/random
Linux 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./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
. Since its creation, /dev/random
and /dev/urandom
have become standard interfaces on Unix, Linux, BSD and macOS systems.
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 real time kernel at IBM, Ts'o joined the Linux Foundation for a 2 years fellowship. Initially he served as Chief Platform Strategist before he became Chief Technology Officer in 2008. Ts'o also served as Treasurer for USENIX until 2008, and has chaired the annual Linux Kernel Developers Summit.