I, Ike Panhc, apply for upload rights for packages linux-armadaxp, linux-armadaxp-meta, linux-highbank and linux-highbank-meta

Who I am

I am a member of the Canonical Hardware Enablement (HWE) Team, working on Ubuntu preinstall projects to make sure the kernel and drivers work properly on specific machines. I also maintain the HWE git repository which keeps source version control tree of Canonical released kernels for OEM projects.

I am also the ideapad-laptop maintainer in the mainline kernel. Most of my contribution to mainline kernel are for platform-x86 drivers.

Why these packages

Canonical is going to release images and kernels for several ARM based servers and we need kernels for them. Therefore I need to apply PPU for these packages.

My Ubuntu story

My involvement

I joined Canonical and started to contribute to Ubuntu and the mainline kernel 3 years ago. Most of the bugs and projects I am involved in are laptop related, such as rfkill reporting wrong status or laptop hotkey has no function.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

Things I'm most proud of are the recent merged patch for acer-wmi. After linux v2.6.38, lots of Lenovo laptop users including thinkpads and ideapads complained that they can not use wireless devices. Its because acer-wmi reports wrong rfkill status to NetworkManager and the user can not unblock it. I proposed the first solution to blacklist them one by one in acer-wmi. Platform-x86 maintainer Matthew Garrett did not like the idea so he proposed that driver only register rfkill after checking if it is unblock-able. But unfortunately user reports rfkill wireless driver will be locked on launchpad bug 875659 and launchpad bug 668234. Then I proposed another fix that prevent acer-wmi-rfkill registered on Lenovo machine by looking into ACPI DSDT tables. This patch has been verified on several user's machines and merged into mainline kernel and there are many reports saying the patch solves this 1 year regression.

Areas of work

I maintain the HWE git repository which is based on Ubuntu distro kernel but upload to another archive for building. Thanks distro kernel team, they maintain a good example of debain packaging scripts and changelog. What I need to do is to review them and make sure they are also suitable in the build environment I am using and the kernel package I upload will not mess up with current Ubuntu image. Most of the time, the simpliest way is to use another flavour name and source package name so that apt will only fetch debs with the same name and upper version number.

Things I could do better

I only have knowledge for few subsystem in kernel such as platform-x86, wireless. What I can do better is to gain knowledge and experience on other subsystem and solve bugs or enable hardware in the mean time.

Plans for the future

General

Most of my contribution on Ubuntu/mainline kernel are for platform-x86 drivers. There are many other subsystems in the kernel that I do not know much of them. To be a kernel engineer, I can not only stay in few subsystem and be satisfied with it. I must join more developing or debugging on multiple subsystem in the future.

What I like least in Ubuntu

Power regression after linux 2.6.38. On Lucid my laptop supports for 6+ hrs battery life, and on Oneiric it is about 4hr. I know that Colin King works hard on it and many change has been applied for Precise. I believe it will be helpful if I can also collect the statistic on my machines and see if there is any thing we can do for it.

Comments

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Endorsements

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=== 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 ===