Thomas Petazzoni

Thomas is Bootlin’s co-owner and Chief Executive Officer.

Thomas joined Bootlin in 2008 as an embedded Linux engineer and trainer, and the first employee of the company. Thomas started the engineering services activity of Bootlin and helped expand the business and engineering team. He became Bootlin’s CTO in 2013, and CEO in 2021. As CTO and then CEO, Thomas is responsible for the management of all engineering projects at Bootlin, from the sales and customer interaction, to the project planning, execution and delivery.

Thomas Petazzoni  

Linux Kernel experience

Thomas has contributed over 900 patches to the official Linux kernel and has key experience in various areas of the Linux kernel, especially related to hardware support. At Bootlin since 2008, Thomas has ported the Linux kernel or written Linux kernel drivers for numerous hardware platforms, based on ARM32, ARM64, x86, SuperH, Blackfin CPU architectures.

From 2012 to 2018, Thomas was a key contributor to the support of Marvell ARM processors to the Linux kernel, contributing with the rest of the team at Bootlin, complete support for several processors from this silicon vendor.

Buildroot experience

Thomas has been contributing to the Buildroot project on a regular basis since 2008. He contributed over 5000 patches to the project, and ultimately became one of the co-maintainers of the project.

Thomas has not only contributed code to Buildroot, but has also developed numerous tools to help maintain the project, and has been organizing the Buildroot Developers meetings since their inception in 2009.

Thomas contributions and maintainer role of the Buildroot project give him a strong and constantly updated background on a large number of embedded Linux topics: new CPU architectures and hardware platforms, cross-compilation, toolchains and compilers, open-source software stacks and components, and more.

Thomas is the author of Bootlin’s Buildroot system development training course, which he is actively teaching to Bootlin customers.

Training experience

Thomas has been teaching Bootlin’s Embedded Linux system development, Linux kernel driver development and Buildroot system development courses since 2008. He has given more than one hundred training courses, in front of over a thousand engineers, in over 40 different countries across the world. Thomas is also a significant contributor to Bootlin’s training materials.

Speaker and program committee member

Thomas is a prolific speaker at various international conferences, especially the Embedded Linux Conference. For his long contribution to the Embedded Linux Conference, he received an award from the conference organization.

Thomas is a member of the program commiteee for the Embedded Linux Conference North America, the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, the Embedded Developers Room at FOSDEM, and the Live Embedded Event.

Prior background

Thomas interest for low-level development, open-source and knowledge sharing didn’t start at Bootlin. As early as 1998, Thomas started KOS , a project that aimed at creating a simple operating system for educational purposes. During his university days (and nights?), he co-authored a long series of articles published in the french Linux magazine that detailed step-by-step how to write an operating system: SOS. In addition, prior to joining Bootlin, he worked on embedded operating systems and Linux kernel development.

In addition, Thomas has been for a long time a strong advocate of open-source and knowledge sharing: he co-founded the Linux users group at his university, then co-founded Toulibre, a local Linux users group in Toulouse and created one of the major free software events in France, Capitole du Libre. Thomas has also been for several years a member of April, a french organization promoting and defending free software.

More

Thomas is based in Toulouse, France. He is a fan of windsurfing and snowboarding, and also an amateur cello player.