I am an open source enthusiast mainly interested in low-level programming and operating systems. My personal interests are mainly in PC-class development and improving the personal computing space in the open source community. On my free time, I mess around with input devices and the stacks related to them.

For fun, I have worked on the hid-nvidia-shield driver. I started this project after playing some games with a friend and learning that Xbox controllers had first class haptics support on Linux (thanks to the xpad driver made by individuals) while the NVIDIA SHIELD controller I was using did not. We were playing BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger at the time, and it was lame to not have haptics support in the game on my controller while the Xbox controller had a nice experience.

For my work at NVIDIA, I do specialized work regarding IEEE 1588 PTP and other timestamping application support in the upstream mlx5 netdev driver for NVIDIA's Mellanox ConnectX NIC product line. The mlx5 driver is a large driver due to the various enterprise networking applications supported by our family of devices. I work on a fairly small part of the driver, mainly components involving PTP and recently MACsec these days. If you are interested in how to write arbitrary userspace applications that can take advantage of various timestamping information provided by the kernel and potentially your networking hardware, I would take a look at the related kernel documentation. I was at NetDevConfx17 in Vancouver on behalf of NVIDIA, and there was an interesting talk by Willem de Brujin (upstream kernel socket timestamping maintainer and kernel developer at Google) on this subject as well.

I do enjoy peeking around the datacenter class open source development space, since some of the work there can be re-used for personal computing. An example is BPF and its original heavy use in the networking space. Now we see more applications of BPF in the space of system profiling and debugging as well as with HID-BPF.

I am fine with being addressed by my real name Rahul Rameshbabu or my online profile handle Binary-Eater (you can shorten that to beater if you prefer when typing in chat).