Ben Widawsky
Staff Software Engineer at Google
Olympia, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Widawsky is a Staff Software Engineer with 15 years of systems and graphics expertise, currently improving Chrome OS at Google. He has deep kernel and userspace experience—leading Linux graphics architecture, contributing to Mesa and i915/i965 drivers, and maintaining the Linux CXL 2.0 subsystem and QEMU emulation at Intel. Ben blends low-level device and firmware work (BIOS/boot, FreeBSD, NUMA, PCI/CXL) with build/release and backend improvements in notable open-source projects like Yosys and pciutils. He’s known for pragmatic refactors that reduce technical debt (e.g., Bison warning fixes, clang-format, DVSEC decoding) and for shepherding platform features such as lossless end-to-end graphics compression. Based in Olympia, Washington, he pairs hardware-adjacent creativity with a proven track record of shipping robust, long-lived infrastructure.
15 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at University at Buffalo
Github Skills (20)
verilog10
system-programming10
numa10
memory-management10
yosys10
c1110
linux-kernel10
c1710
pci10
build-automation10
c-language9
performance-optimization9
device-driver9
code-formatting9
cprogramming-language9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
pciutils/pciutils
Jul 2020 - Jun 2021
The PCI Utilities
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 9 commits, 3 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the `pciutils/pciutils` repository by implementing and modifying CXL-related device capabilities. Their work involved renaming variables, refactoring code, and implementing more device DVSEC decoding, particularly focusing on CXL (Compute Express Link) functionality. The contributions included adding support for DVSEC port capabilities and a register locator, enhancing the parsing and display of device information related to CXL technology. The user also collaborated with others on these changes.
pci
numactl/numactl
May 2020 - Nov 2021
NUMA support for Linux
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 1 PR, 2 comments in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the `numactl` project by implementing and refactoring features related to memory policies and node management. They added support for multiple preferred nodes, simplified preferred selection logic, and exported interfaces for setting and getting preferred nodes. Furthermore, the user made improvements to the demonstration program, `numademo`, including updating dependencies, adding tests, and modifying memory allocation behavior based on the memory policy changes. Their work demonstrates a deep understanding of the NUMA architecture.
numalinux
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