Alexey Makhalov
Software Engineer at Broadcom
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlexey Makhalov is a seasoned software engineer with 14 years of experience building low-level systems, embedded platforms, and cloud-focused OS tooling, currently at Broadcom after a long tenure driving Photon OS at VMware. He combines deep systems expertise—kernel debugging, cross-toolchain ports, and SoC bring-up—with practical architecture work, having enabled aarch64 builds, trusted boot, and FIPS kernel features for minimal container hosts. A prolific open-source contributor, he added VMware guest-dump debugging to the widely used crash utility and has repeatedly improved build and packaging workflows for Photon. His background spans processor design support, simulator and SDK creation, and extensive toolchain and libc ports across custom RISC architectures, reflecting rare end-to-end control from silicon to OS. Based in Redmond, he pairs academic grounding (Master’s in Computer Software Engineering from MIET) with a pragmatic focus on reliable, debuggable systems that scale in production.
14 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree, Computer Software Engineering, A, Master's degree, Computer Software Engineering, A at National Research University of Electronic Technology (MIET)
Russian, English
Github Skills (12)
c1710
build-system10
vmware10
c1110
linux-kernel10
package-management10
boot10
debug9
arm9
debugging9
code-optimization8
x86-648
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
vmware/photon
May 2015 - Oct 2022
Minimal Linux container host
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:837 commits, 46 PRs, 139 pushes in 7 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Alexey's contributions focused on enhancing the build process of the photon image, a minimal Linux container host. They introduced features like support for building with aarch64, enabling kernel features such as CRYPTO_FIPS, and integrating with a trusted boot mechanism. Furthermore, the user refactored the package builder to streamline toolchain building and improved the handling of dependencies, contributing to overall build efficiency and reliability.
containershostlinuxdockercontainer-linux
crash-utility/crash
Oct 2020 - Aug 2021
Linux kernel crash utility
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 4 PRs, 1 comment in 10 months
Contributions summary:Alexey primarily contributed to the development of the `crash-utility/crash` repository by adding new functionality for debugging VMware guest dumps. They implemented the `vmware_guestdump` feature, which allows the utility to debug `.guest` and `.vmem` files obtained from VMware virtual machines. The user added new code, including a new file `vmware_guestdump.c`, to parse and utilize guest dump data. They also integrated the new guest dump functionality with existing VMware VMSS code, allowing for the reuse of existing handlers.
kernellinux-kernellinux
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