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. I also enjoy gaming on Linux and have done work patching White Album 2 for use with Proton. More recently, I have been learning Vulkan and picking up Rust.

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 am part of the Linux Graphics Team. The team's work involves DRM/KMS, X11 and Wayland UMD work, as well as OpenGL and Vulkan support. I tend to enjou triaging and fixing display related issues, but in reality I would like to have a diverse understanding of various engines of the GPU for both rendering, presentation, and scanout purposes. Previously, I spent two years on NVIDIA's Linux kernel netdev team, working on IEEE 1588 PTP, MACsec, and other components in the upstream mlx5 netdev driver for the ConnectX and BlueField products. You can find my relevant work from that period by searching my name on the netdev mailing list archives.

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).