Brian Behlendorf
Computer Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian Behlendorf is a computer scientist with 24 years of hands-on experience in Linux kernel and file system development, currently working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He is a seasoned contributor to major open-source storage projects—most notably OpenZFS—where his work improves performance, reliability, and robustness of zpool/zvol operations and fixes subtle race and memory issues. His contributions to illumos and e2fsprogs show deep expertise in on-disk formats, ACLs, and memory-safety hardening, and he also maintains OpenZFS documentation updates for real-world deployers. Earlier entrepreneurial work building PIC microcontroller systems demonstrates practical hardware and embedded systems fluency alongside his kernel focus. Based in Livermore, CA, he combines long-term project stewardship with pragmatic bug-fixing that prevents production outages and data loss. Collectedly, his profile signals a rare blend of low-level systems mastery, documentation discipline, and reliability-first engineering.
24 years of coding experience
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison
Github Skills (17)
filesystem10
fedora10
openzfs10
il10
memory-management10
c1110
verity10
c1710
zfs10
fileio10
performance-tuning10
error-handling10
documentation10
concurrency10
operating-system10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
openzfs/zfs
Nov 2008 - Jan 2023
OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:55 releases, 3895 reviews, 27302 commits in 14 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Brian's contributions primarily focus on improving the performance, reliability, and features of ZFS. They addressed a race condition in the IO pipeline by dropping the lock before calling zio_execute(), fixed an issue where a potential out of memory error could occur and made several performance improvements to device removal and volume operations. Additionally, they fixed various bugs, improved error handling, and added support for new features, such as enabling the "prefetch" property at the dataset level. The majority of commits appear to be focused on making zpool and zvol related changes.
freebsdlinuxopenzfssystem-softwarefile-system
illumos/illumos-gate
May 2010 - Sep 2022
An open-source Unix operating system -- this is a read-only mirror of the official repository at https://code.illumos.org/plugins/gitiles/illumos-gate
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 commits in 12 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Brian's contributions focus on enhancing the ZFS file system within the illumos operating system. The commits involve improvements to SA (storage attribute) handling, including optimizations for on-disk corruption scenarios. Further modifications address issues in ZFS ACLs, particularly concerning upgrades and permission handling after idmap flushes. Additionally, the user made changes to the ZFS vnops to fix memory leaks and align properties.
operating-systemunixillumosos
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