Webinar
My Life as a Linux Kernel Developer and Maintainer with Paul E. McKenney
July 7, 2026 | 08:00 AM PDT (UTC-7)
Join us for an interactive, complimentary Maintainer Session with Paul E. McKenney
Paul E. McKenney and Shuah Khan will talk about Paul's experience as a kernel developer and maintainer, taking questions from the attendees. Paul will share what works and what doesn’t for him and strategies, interpersonal and technical skills and mindset that help him stay engaged for a longer term.
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Paul E. McKenney
Software Engineer, Meta
Speaker
Paul E. McKenney is best known as the co-inventor and lead maintainer of the RCU implementation within the Linux kernel. He has been coding for five decades, and more than half of that on parallel hardware. He has written an open-source book on parallel/concurrent programming that has been translated into four different languages, as well as more than 300 other publications that, taken together, have been cited more than 10,000 times. He is also a member of the C and the C++ standard committees, where he serves as an expert on concurrency.
His prior lives include working on Linux-kernel RCU at IBM, working on the DYNIX/ptx kernel at Sequent, work on packet radio, Internet protocols, and system administration at SRI International, work on embedded systems as a self-employed contract programmer, and coding and maintaining a business application during his first trip through university. His hobbies include what passes for running at his age (AKA hiking) along with the usual house-wife-and-grown-kids habit.