PPU

I, Alex Hung, apply for upload rights for package fwts.

Name

Alex Hung

Launchpad Page

http://launchpad.net/~alexhung

Wiki Page

Alex Hung

Who I am

I am a software developer in the Hardware Enablement team in Canonical Ltd. Before joining Canonical, I worked as a BIOS engineer in Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Pegatron Corp. and ASUSTek for the laptop computer development for major OEM companies.

My Ubuntu story

My first Ubuntu experience was in my 4th year of undergrad. I started using Linux in the prior summer job in computer lab in Queen's University, and decided to install Ubuntu on my personal computer afterwards because it was a better OS for software development. All my 4th-year programming assignments were done on Ubuntu.

I joined Canonical in 2011 and my primary responsibility was firmware-related. It includes, not limited to, contributing patches to ACPI and platform drivers to Linux kernel. In 2011, PC BIOS was not very compatible with Ubuntu and I spent much time with many PC vendors improving their BIOS on Ubuntu.

My involvement

My contribution to Ubuntu are mostly on the kernel. This includes new hotkey, hp-wireless (now called wireless-hotkey) and intel-hid drivers, and various patches to different subsystems. These contributions greatly improve usability of the Ubuntu on PC.

I have personally met BIOS developers and designers in UEFI Plugfest where I sat and debugged with BIOS engineers from CPU and PC vendors. Many BIOS issues on Ubuntu were resolved in early development stages.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

A listed of kernel patches I submitted can be found here

The work on FWTS was recognized by UEFI forum (the organization defines the PC and ARM firmware standards) and FWTS is now the recommended ACPI Self-Certification Test (SCT).

I co-worked with BIOS teams from major PC vendors and was able to influence their BIOS designs during 2011 to 2016. Many of strange bugs on Ubuntu such as s3 failures, malfunction hotkeys and weird brightness behaviours were resolved in either BIOS or in Ubuntu (both in kernel or in userspace).

Areas of work

My focus on Linux kernel is firmware-related. This includes ACPI, UEFI, SMBIOS and platform drivers. I also backported many patches from mainline to Ubuntu kernels.

Another important part is to work with PC vendors, both in PC OEM projects and in UEFI groups such as ACPI Work Group (ASWG) and UEFI Test Work Group (UTWG). In PC OEM projects, I suggest various BIOS fixes or develop kernel fixes. In UEFI group meeting, I submit ECR changes to ACPI specs and implement tests to validate firmware implementation against ACPI specs.

I am a maintainer of firmware test suite (FWTS) and FWTS-LIVE project. I am responsible for reviewing patches and release FWTS. I am also the primary contributor to the ACPI, CPU, and DMI/SMBIOS tests, among many others.

Things I could do better

I can spend time on Linux kernel. In addition, I could participate more in other open source projects.

Plans for the future

General

With the upload permission of fwts package, I hope to have a release/upload monthly.

What I like least in Ubuntu

I used to find each Ubuntu version has serious bugs (for me at least) when it is released, and therefore I was forced to roll back to the previous release. The failures include suspend/resume, Chinese inputs, Virtualbox, wine and so on. Thankfully, these have been improved significantly in recent releases.

However, many gnome extensions can get broken but this is inevitable since Ubuntu needs to update new Gnome.


Comments

If you'd like to comment, but are not the applicant or a sponsor, do it here. Don't forget to sign with @SIG@.


Endorsements

As a sponsor, just copy the template below, fill it out and add it to this section.

Colin Ian King

General Feedback

I have sponsored 38 Firmware Test Suite packages that Alex has worked on. His work on this has been most excellent and I've not had to re-work any of the packaging before an upload. He is a major contributor to the project and PPU for fwts is going to be really useful for the future development work on this project. Keep up the good work Alex!


TEMPLATE

== <SPONSORS NAME> ==
=== General feedback ===
## Please fill us in on your shared experience. (How many packages did you sponsor? How would you judge the quality? How would you describe the improvements? Do you trust the applicant?)

=== Specific Experiences of working together ===
''Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.''
=== Areas of Improvement ===


AlexHung/PPU (last edited 2021-09-20 19:19:38 by alexhung)