Paolo Bonzini
Distinguished Engineer (Software Engineer) at Red Hat
Milan, Lombardy, Italy
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaolo Bonzini is a Distinguished Engineer with 26 years of experience, currently leading long-term virtualization and storage work at Red Hat and collaborating across vendors and open-source communities. He combines deep low-level systems expertise—demonstrated by contributions to QEMU, KVM, the Linux kernel and userspace RCU—with a strong focus on testability and build/test automation (Avocado, Meson, tp-qemu). Paolo holds a Ph.D. in computer science for work that bridged combinatorial algorithms and compiler design for customizable ISAs, and he brings that research rigor to pragmatic engineering decisions. He mentors engineers, chairs technical programs like KVM Forum, and helps partners upstream production features. Notably, he maintains Windows drivers for Xen guests and has improved emulation and memory-management across x86, RISC-V and arm64 in widely used projects such as QEMU and the Linux kernel. Based in Milan, he blends academic depth, long-standing open-source stewardship, and practical product-minded engineering.
26 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
M.Sc., Computer Science Engineering, M.Sc., Computer Science Engineering at Politecnico di MilanoPh.D. Student, Computer Science, Ph.D. Student, Computer Science at USI Università della Svizzera italiana
English, Italian, Czech
Stackoverflow
1,910reputation
184kreached
61answers
2questions
Github Skills (82)
kvm10
controller10
python10
computer-architecture10
atomics10
testing10
firmware10
low-level10
svm10
c1110
perl10
glib10
c1710
low-level-programming10
vms10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
bonzini/qboot
May 2015 - Mar 2020
Minimal x86 firmware for booting Linux kernels
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:63 commits, 14 PRs, 48 pushes in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Paolo primarily focused on enhancing the firmware's capabilities for booting Linux kernels within a minimal x86 environment. Their work included implementing support for Compact Boot File System (CBFS), modifying existing code to handle specific boot parameters, and refactoring 16-bit code segments. The user also integrated with QEMU's firmware configuration (fw_cfg) to enable multiboot functionality.
kernelbootingfirmwarelinuxx86
qemu/qemu
Mar 2017 - Sep 2024
Official QEMU mirror. Please see https://www.qemu.org/contribute/ for how to submit changes to QEMU. Pull Requests are ignored. Please only use release tarballs from the QEMU website.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 PR, 2513 pushes, 6 branches in 7 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Paolo primarily contributed to the core functionality of the QEMU project. Their commits involved modifying and enhancing the low-level workings of the x86 and RISC-V architectures, including code generation, memory management, and system-level components. They demonstrated a strong understanding of processor architecture and memory management, evident through their work on improving the handling of interrupts, virtual machine exits, and implementing new CPU instructions. These enhancements aimed to improve the performance and compatibility of QEMU's emulation capabilities.
linuxtarballsqemusubmitpull-requests
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