My Life as a Linux Kernel Developer and Maintainer with Sasha Levin

Speaker

Sasha Levin, Distinguished Software Engineer, NVIDIA

Sasha Levin is a Distinguished Software Engineer at NVIDIA and the co-maintainer of the Linux stable and long-term support (LTS) kernel trees, a role in which he oversees the review and backporting of roughly 100 patches per day across multiple active release branches. A Linux kernel contributor since the early 2000s who built deep systems expertise at Oracle's Ksplice team, Microsoft, and Google, he is also the creator of AUTOSEL, an AI-powered stable backport classifier written in Rust that leverages large language models and embedding technology to automatically determine which upstream commits should be cherry-picked into stable releases. His recent work has focused on the intersection of AI and kernel engineering, including proposing official guidelines for AI-assisted contributions to the Linux kernel and advocating for practical LLM integration in maintainer workflows at conferences such as the Open Source Summit and Linux Plumbers Conference.

Shuah Khan, Fellow, The Linux Foundation

Shuah Khan is a Linux Fellow at The Linux Foundation. She is an experienced Linux Kernel developer, maintainer, and contributor. She maintains Kernel Selftest framework, USB over IP driver, and cpupower. She is an active contributor to Linux media subsystem. She has contributed to IOMMU, and DMA areas. In addition, she is helping with stable release kernel testing. She publishes blogs on Linux Kernel topics on her blog site at http://www.gonehiking.org/ShuahLinuxBlogs/.

She has presented at several Linux conferences and Linux Kernel Developer Keynote Panels. She served on the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board. She authored Linux Kernel Testing and Debugging paper published on the Linux Journal and wrote Linux Journal kernel news articles.