I, Christian Ehrhardt, hereby apply for MOTU upload permissions. In recent months I came by several things that my work for the Ubuntu server-teams led me to and needed MOTU. In particular I merged nis two times now, worked on some nis bugs, recently started on postgres as well but all auxillary pg-* tools are MOTU as well. That said I thought the time would be right to apply for MOTU rights now - my personal upload history filled up more to hopefully prove my work. Furthermore as listed above I've encountered more cases with MOTU needs to back up this request, and there just seem to be more cases every month now which seem to fall in this category.

Who I am

I'm member of Canonical in the Server Team since late 2015 and working there primarily on virtualization and ovisously server related tasks. I worked primiarly on qemu, libvirt and DPDK packaging and testing as well as many other minor packages that fall under the watch of the server Team (merges and SRUs). I also participate in Cloud-init/Curtin development as needed. I have a long history in System z regarding Linux Performance Analysis and due to that also work on s390x or performance related issues every now and then.

In "the other life" I'm a 36 years old rather tall guy with the default family model: wife, son, daughter. And as all of us struggling to keep my hobbies of biking and playing saxophone alive in between work and family.

My Ubuntu story leading to MOTU application

My Linux story starts with Gentoo around 2003. It suited my nature of optimizing things and emerge was a great package management tool at the time. Since around 2008 I changed all my systems to Ubuntu as it was just easier to consume in so many ways. Over time the full range from small embedded or HTPC to reasonable Server installations as well as on many of my Desktops were based on Ubuntu. I was closer to the Kernel for a while with a Thesis about I/O Schedulers in 2004. Then I worked with Linux as a performance analyst in IBM since 2004, but that was focused on System z where for a long time only Suse and RedHat existed. Yet that brought me into contact with so many benchmark, packages and the Kernel. A typical jack of all trades - expert in none but skilled in everything approach - causing a few fixes here and there around the open source community. I was switching between Performance analyst and a KVM Developer Role in between to further bolster my set of experiences. When the chance to join Canonical showed up in 2015 I saw the opportunity to combine my IBM Linux and virtualization history with really working on free software. Since then I'm slowly growing into more and more packages that fall under the server-teams responsibility. Over time that led more and more often to packages often somewhat associated to packages I work on in the server-dev's POV that are part of the MOTU set. Also and totally different to my day to day work I every now and then have faced MOTU tasks when supporting my Families more Desktop style Ubuntu systems which MOTU permissions would help as well to help more.

Adding further MOTU needs I came along recently: - asterisk for pad.lv/1671767

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

• I'm a German, we are usually not proud but criticize ourself, trying to list some stuff still

• Optimizing KVM on s390x to outperform the classic z/VM Hipervisor in various areas up to 5x - full range from tuning to kernel patches.
• Identifying several complex performance issues over the years from faulty chip design up to sub-optimal cross application interactions.

• recently making DPDK available on Ubuntu in (IMHO) the first user consumable way (https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/05/05/the-new-simplicity-to-consume-dpdk/, unfortunately this upstream has surprise every release cycle but that forces me to learn which is good)

• founding and driving joint packaging group to continue evolving DPDK in a colaborating way for Debian and Ubuntu (https://wiki.fd.io/view/Deb_dpdk)

• Taking over most of qemu/libvirt work after Serge Hallyn left us which so far went well. Along that I was establishing a lot of extra testing to finally get rid of so many migration issues we had. Also that gives us a better warning system via jenkins

• ah the topic was "proud", every-time I can drop delta and actually can prepare and submit more to upstream and Debian to do more next time I'm "a bit" proud as I think that helps all the community sense as well as maintenance of those deltas (if only there would be more time for this sometimes)

Areas of work

Since joining Canonical I was part of the Server Team and are:

• working on Curtin and Cloud-Init with Scott Moser
• working on Subiquity with Ryan Harper
• working on various s390x issues with Dann Frazier and Dimitri Ledkov
• taking over DPDK completely from Stefan Bader
• working on openvswitch-dpdk with James Page
• taking over Qemu/Libvirt from Serge Hallyn
• working on many merges/fixes with James Page, Chris Arges, Martin Pitt, Adam Conrad, Robie Basak, ...
• regular bug triage duty for the server team helps to see what people really run into (and makes them feel cared about)

Things I could do better

There are still a lot of hidden "this is the way it is done in Ubuntu" gems that I have to uncover and adapt. But it gets better with every bug/upload/discussion I work on. I got the feeling recently that the last bunch of merges went by far smoother and easier. Still every now and then I run into something rather arcane or undocumented and un-earthing that can be hard.

Other than that I really want to be even more active in "helping people" - I started to keep an eye on IRC channels and askubuntu for that and it feels good - I just think that makes Ubuntu better overall.

Plans for the future

General

IMHO Linux in general has a very bad swapping spike behavior when passing into memory shortage that I really hate. I have quite some ideas about a triple watermark design and low prio async writers and all that stuff that I want to work on one day. That is a long term thing I still carry from my performance times and I don't know if I can ever tackle this - but it is one particular thing in the back of my mind.

Well I said that last time I applied for some upload rights and nothing moved so I assume that just will be the case for a while :-/

What I like least in Ubuntu

I cut my old deail a bit short - TL;DR I think we are nod good enough on QA and SRUs. I think we could double the efforts on those and still not work in-vain or have anybody idling.

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

I want to refer to my core-dev / server-dev application endorsements as well as my recent extension to Multipath-tools and Postgres - additionally I asked a few more people to endorse here, but as most common sponsors were on the other applications already I had to reach out a bit more here.

Martin Pitt

I've worked with Christian on PostgreSQL, OpenDPDK, autopkgtest, and various other server-related packages for over a year. He demonstrated sufficient understanding of packaging and the Ubuntu policies, doesn't shy away from asking questions when he isn't sure, and works with our upstreams. I trust him do do simple/obvious package changes by himself by now, and trust him to ask if he encounters something new.

My most recent experience with him was the recent PostgreSQL SRU which he handled exemplary well.

-- pitti 2017-03-10 14:11:46

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.''
## Full list of sponsored packages can be generated here:
## http://ubuntu-dev.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi?
=== Areas of Improvement ===

CategoryPerPackageUploaderApplication