Michael Tsirkin
Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat
Tamra, North District, Israel
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichael Tsirkin is a Distinguished Engineer with 26 years of deep systems and kernel expertise, currently leading virtio and vhost development at Red Hat and chairing the Virtio Technical Committee. He is a prolific open-source maintainer across Linux kernel and QEMU, co-designing vhost interfaces and editing the Virtio specification while ranking among the top contributors in multiple Linux releases. His background spans low-level drivers, virtualization, networking and embedded firmware—skills honed at Mellanox and Google—plus protocol and API design for high-performance virtual networking. Notably, his contributions to the widely used QEMU project and to InfiniBand/zero-copy networking demonstrate a rare blend of practical bug fixes, security-aware design and forward-looking protocol invention. He combines formal CS training (MSc) with physics intuition, and maintains a public patch history you can trace via mst@redhat.com and mst@mellanox.co.il.
26 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
B.A, Physics, B.A, Physics at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Github Skills (17)
system-programming10
qemu10
c1110
linux-kernel10
networking10
virtio10
c1710
pci10
virtualization10
emulation10
memory-management9
error-handling9
acpi9
embedded8
data-structures8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
jonsmirl/mpc5200
Apr 2009 - May 2011
Digispeaker
Role in this project:
Back-end & Systems Engineer
Back-end & Systems EngineerContributions:117 commits in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the core networking functionalities within the repository, specifically focusing on the implementation and optimization of data transfer operations. Their work involved creating new functions for copying data between memory and iovecs, and adapting existing methods to support asynchronous I/O (AIO) operations. Key contributions included modifying and refactoring existing kernel code related to packet processing and data transfer. The changes suggest a focus on improving the efficiency and performance of network packet handling.
qemu/qemu
Oct 2023 - Sep 2024
Official QEMU mirror. Please see https://www.qemu.org/contribute/ for how to submit changes to QEMU. Pull Requests are disabled. Please only use release tarballs from the QEMU website.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the QEMU project by fixing issues related to code style, functionality, and addressing potential vulnerabilities. The user addressed various bugs, including those related to PCI resource allocation, interrupt configuration, and ACPI table validation. The user also made several revert commits for changes that introduced regressions and incompatibilities.
qemuemulationvirtualization
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