Ryan O'Leary

Ryan O'Leary

Ryan O’Leary is a core developer of LinuxBoot within Google. Ryan contributes significantly to u-root and fiano, and was a key researcher of the LinuxBoot project in its early stages at Google. Ryan studied software engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He has a keen interest in firmware, hardware and embedded systems.

LinuxBoot status report

LinuxBoot replaces most of the firmware image with a Linux kernel and a tailored initramfs. We started the LinuxBoot project in Jan 2017 at Google. In March 2017, we opened the project to the world. Since that time, Facebook, Horizon Computing, Two Sigma, and others have joined the project. It has also become a project at the Linux Foundation as well as becoming a core part of the Open System Firmware project at the Open Compute Foundation.

The project is moving very quickly, with sales of zero LinuxBoot systems in 2017, and several tens of thousands in 2018. We expect the project to continue to grow.

In this talk, we will provide an update on LinuxBoot, how we integrated it into UEFI and coreboot, and describe the different efforts using it and how you can get involved.