• FOSDEM 2020
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• Schedule
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• Speakers
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• Luc Verhaegen

Luc has been writing open source graphics drivers since 2003 and has a track-record of doing things that are at first deemed impossible or even wrong, yet later become the norm.

Luc paved the way for algorithmic, bios-free display drivers with his work on VIAs Unichrome, which spawned many modern display driver development paradigms (and even the term mode-setting). He also introduced the first fully native display driver to Coreboot making the first off-the-shelf motherboard with complete blob-free coreboot support possible.

At SuSE, together with Egbert Eich and Matthias Hopf, he proved to AMD that a free and maintainable driver could be created for Radeon hardware, despite ATIs best attempts to hamper this. Later on, he demonstrated the feasibility and flexibility of integrated graphics driver stacks and, as a follow-up, building DRI drivers externally to the still very monolithic Mesa, and even a rudimentary Mesa SDK. While at Nokia, he worked on improving the debugging infrastructure for the PowerVR GPU used in the Nokia N9, with the intention of making Nokias Meego/Maemo project less directly dependent on Imaginations own driver and support.

At FOSDEM2012 he presented a reverse engineered graphics driver for the ARM Mali GPUs, the first project to seriously create an open source GPU driver for the ARM space. The lima driver inspired a few like-minded individuals to tackle similarly daunting tasks and now most major ARM GPUs have open source graphics drivers in various stages of completeness. His reverse engineering framework for the lima project has been directly copied or replicated many times since. His intervention on the initial Broadcom "graphics driver release" triggered the proper open source graphics driver strategy followed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation today. Due to his work on the ARM Mali driver, he also ended up being one of the co-founders of the linux-sunxi community.

Luc has been organizing FOSDEM devrooms since 2006, and has been helping out with the FOSDEM video team since 2017. Now, Luc is the primary developer of the FOSDEM video box.

Luc lives in Nuernberg, Germany, the linux capital of germany, with his girlfriend and a 3y old son, surrounded by a bunch of likeminded linux developers. He makes a living selling his time as a linux consultant focussing on drivers, both in bootloaders, kernel and userspace.

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