Palmer Dabbelt
Engineer at Meta
Redwood City, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPalmer Dabbelt is a systems-focused engineer with 16 years of experience building low-level software, toolchains, and embedded platforms, currently working at Meta after roles at Rivos, Google, and SiFive. He has deep RISC-V expertise—maintaining ports of binutils/GCC/Linux/glibc, contributing to the Linux kernel, Spike ISA simulator, and Rocket Chip—and regularly improves build and test infrastructures to keep complex toolchains and simulators working across changing compilers and hardware. Palmer’s contributions span embedded bring-up (UART, i-cache flushes, multiprocessor boot control) to automation and release engineering (AOSP build scripts, crosstool-ng toolchains, regression test orchestration). He combines research-caliber rigor from a UC Berkeley MS with practical product experience shipping SMP examples, device-mapper enhancements, and tooling used by broad open-source communities. Notably, he moves fluidly between debugging floating-point and ABI corner cases and large-scale build-system fixes, a mix that keeps both hardware and software stacks reliable. Based in Redwood City, CA, he’s an active open-source collaborator whose work is woven through prominent projects in the RISC-V and Linux ecosystems.
15 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyBachelor of Science (BS) Computer Engineering Engineering Physics, Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Engineering Engineering Physics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaignnone Computer Science, none Computer Science at Harvard Extension School
Stackoverflow
1,020reputation
98kreached
22answers
0questions
assembly
top-5%
Github Skills (69)
hardware-designs10
verilog10
float3210
python10
testing10
gcc-compiler10
bash10
android-build10
c1110
c1710
blockdevice10
build-automation10
rt10
floating-point10
embedded10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
riscv-collab/riscv-gnu-toolchain
Nov 2014 - May 2022
GNU toolchain for RISC-V, including GCC
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 releases, 253 commits, 188 PRs in 7 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Palmer's contributions primarily focused on enhancing the RISC-V GNU toolchain, specifically addressing compatibility and functionality related to floating-point operations and system calls. Their work included modifying floating-point routines to support ABIs without hardware floating-point units, adapting code for specific RISC-V instructions, and fixing build issues related to compiler configurations. Furthermore, the user made several changes in the binutils component of the toolchain, cleaning up code, and updating dependencies to maintain the toolchain's functionality.
risc-vgnutoolchainriscgcc
riscv-software-src/riscv-tools
Feb 2015 - Apr 2019
RISC-V Tools (ISA Simulator and Tests)
Role in this project:Automation Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
Automation Engineer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:1 release, 70 commits, 64 PRs in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Palmer primarily focused on modifying build scripts and configurations for the RISC-V tools project. They added OpenOCD as a build dependency, integrated changes from the master branch, and disabled `-Werror` flags to resolve build issues with newer compilers. Furthermore, the user removed a broken toolchain and replaced it with a new toolchain built using crosstool-ng, ensuring the continued functionality of the project's build processes. Their contributions centered around improving the build and test infrastructure.
risc-visariscvsimulatorrisc
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