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• Ville Syrjala

Open source GPU lifer working for Intel OTC.

In the distant past Ville started down the graphics path while playing around with Matrox G-series graphics cards. Since then there have been some distractions, most notably working for Nokia on the N900 and N9 graphics and display drivers. Currently Ville works on the i915 kernel driver for Intel's current and future GPUs.

Ville has been using Linux since the Slackware 3.0 days of mid-90's. He never really took to programming until late 90's, when he started with some small user space stuff, and soon after posted some early attempts online for the world to see.

His love of grapics cards began with playing around with the Matrox G200 and G400 cards. First just following the development of projects like utah-glx, and later by programming the hardware for himself. Playing videos on the TV-out was the initial spark for really getting into the game, which also introduced him to DirectFB. At the time DirectFB seemed like the only sensible framework when dealing with graphics cards and YUV data. After getting the TV-out features working Ville expanded into other areas. Soon he gained commit rights to the DirectFB repositories, and spent most of his off-hours efforts on that front.

At one point Ville was working for Movial on some non-graphics related Nokia projects. Then came the opportunity to join Nokia's expanding graphics team working on Maemo and the N900. After the launch of the N900, the next few years were spent working on what would eventually become the N9.

When Nokia announced that the Maemo/MeeGo efforts would be scrapped, Ville joined Intel's ranks with numerous other ex-Nokia colleagues. After some initial tinkering with some internal projects, he got to shift over to the i915.ko driver development. So currently he is working on Intel's kernel graphics drivers and basically upstreaming everything. It doesn't get much better than that.

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