Con Kolivas is a Greek-Australian anaesthetist.Anaesthesia Information Page by Kolivas, Jan 2001 He has worked as a computer programmer on the Linux kernel and on the development of the cryptographic currency mining software CGMiner.CGMiner GitHub repository, "ASIC and FPGA miner in c for bitcoin" His Linux contributions include patches for the kernel to improve its desktop performance, particularly reducing I/O impact.
Linux Kolivas is most notable for his work with CPU scheduling, most significantly his implementation of "fair scheduling", which inspired Ingo Molnár to develop his Completely Fair Scheduler, as a replacement for the earlier O(1) scheduler, crediting Kolivas in his announcement., 18 April 2007, KernelTrap.org Kolivas developed several CPU schedulers such as the Staircase in 2004,The staircase scheduler [LWN.net] then Rotating Staircase Deadline (RSDL),The Rotating Staircase Deadline Scheduler [LWN.net] and subsequently Staircase Deadline (SD)LKML: Con Kolivas: [PATCH]Staircase scheduler - experimental schedulers to address interactivity concerns of the Linux kernel with respect to desktop computing. Additionally, he has written a "swap prefetch" patch, which allows processes to respond quickly after the operating system has been idle for some time and their working sets have been swapped out.Swap prefetching [LWN.net] Many of his experimental "-CK" patches, such as his prefetching and scheduling code, did not get merged with the official Linux kernel.
In 2007, Kolivas announced in an email that he would cease developing for the Linux kernel. Discussing his reasons in an interview, he expressed frustration with aspects of the mainline kernel development process, which he felt did not give sufficient priority to desktop interactivity, in addition to hacking taking a toll on his health, work and family.
He has also written a benchmarking tool called ConTestThe homepage of contest that can be used to compare the performance of different kernel versions., 16 October 2002, KernelTrap.org
On 31 August 2009, Kolivas posted a new scheduler called BFS (Brain Fuck Scheduler).Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler [LWN.net] It is designed for desktop use and to be very simple (hence it may not scale well to machines with many CPU cores). Con Kolivas did not intend to get it merged into the mainline kernel.BFS FAQ He has since retired BFS in favour of MuQSS, a rewritten implementation of the same concept.
CGMiner On 13 July 2011, Kolivas introduced a new piece of software for "windows, linux, OSX and other" called CGMiner, which is used for mining cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Litecoin.
References
External links Kolivas's personal website