What I do

Fixing things is in my DNA - it's one of those passions that keeps me motivated and busy. Maybe it is the hunt - tracking down why something does not work that I find interesting, like a detective gathering evidence and then making a deduction that solves the mystery. Or maybe it is the fun in discovering or learning new features about a technology as I try to solve a bug. Or it could be the warm feeling in knowing that a problem is fixed which helps users to have a less buggy machine. Whatever the underlying reason, I get a kick out of fixing obscure problems and making things work better.

Fortunately for me, my work in Canonical enabling Ubuntu to work on PCs fulfils this passion of mine. My daily work normally involves me looking at obscure firmware issues in PC BIOSs and figuring out what is wrong and how to address and fix the problem.

Without fixing these issues, quite a few machines would just not function correctly for various reasons. My work involves fixing issues such as Suspend/Resume and Hibernate/Resume hangs, or looking at why hardware is not quite configured correctly after boot or resume. Unfortunately buggy firmware does happen quite frequently and leads to all sorts of weird issues. Hotkeys, LCD backlights, wake alarms, fan controls, thermal trip points and even CPU configuration can be affected by BIOS or ACPI bugs. All these need fixing, so it keeps me busy!

Fun in the deep end

Firmware is unlike Open Source code found in Ubuntu - firmware is closed, proprietary and hence figuring out why it's broken can be tricky and hence time consuming.

I spend quite a lot time looking at kernel logs, ACPI tables and disassembling ACPI byte code looking at why kernel/BIOS interactions are misbehaving. Some of the work involves looking at the way the BIOS interacts with the embedded controller and figuring out if the ACPI byte code is written correctly or not.

Because Canonical has a good relationship with many desktop hardware vendors, I have access to the BIOS engineers who are actually writing this code. I can directly report my findings and suggested fixes to them, and then they re-work the BIOS. The end result is a PC that is sold with a BIOS that works correctly with Linux, and not just Ubuntu - all distributions benefit from this work.

You may not see my fixes appear as commits in the Linux kernel because much of my work is silent and behind the scenes - fixing firmware that make Linux work better.

Quality Counts

My other passion is quality. While it's fine to fix bugs, it's even better to detect them in the first place! Hence I was motivated to write the Firmware Test Suite - this is a tool that aims to find and diagnose BIOS and ACPI bugs automatically and even suggest possible workarounds and fixes. This tool is now being actively used by BIOS vendors to catch errors early in the development cycle and is part of the on going work to make sure that Linux compatibility really matters.

I've been developing this tool for the Maverick 10.10 release and hope to add more intelligent firmware tests for Natty 11.04 based on further analysis of current bug reports and lessons learnt while enabling Ubuntu on various PC hardware platforms.

I hope this gives a flavour of the kind of work I do for Ubuntu. It's enjoyable, challenging and satisfying to see one's work make Linux better.