Con Kolivas

Con Kolivas is a practicing doctor in Australia, but he is known for the work done on the Linux kernel in his spare time. He has specialized at writing patches for the kernel to improve the performance on desktop Linux. The I/O bound received his attention in particular. He has also written a benchmarking tool called ConTest that can be used to compare the performance of different kernel versions.

Con is most notable for his work with CPU scheduling, more importantly his idea of "fair scheduling", for which Ingo Molnar developed a rewrite called the Completely Fair Scheduler, as a replacement for the earlier O(1) scheduler, attributing a footnote to Con Kolivas. Con developed several CPU schedulers such as the Staircase Scheduler in 2004 then Rotating Staircase Deadline (RSDL) then afterwards the Staircase Deadline (SD) CPU scheduler to address interactivity concerns of the Linux kernel with respect to desktop computing. In parallel, he did some work around swap prefetch, which allows processes to quickly be responsive after the computer has been idle for some time. Many of his experimental patches, which are -ck patches such as swap prefetch and any of his CPU schedulers did not get merged with the official Linux kernel.

On July 24, 2007, Kolivas informed the Kernel developers that he will quit developing for the kernel. The reasons he gave are that desktop performance on Linux is getting too little attention and that "Linux is burdened with 'enterprise crap' that makes it run poorly on desktop PCs". The "enterprise crap" being kernel development for servers. He said, in an interview with APC Magazine, that he saw limitations of Linux not appealing to normal users, and thus quit.