Paul Mckenney
Software Engineer at Meta
Beaverton, Oregon, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPaul Mckenney is a veteran software engineer with 26+ years focused on concurrency, real-time and kernel-level systems, currently contributing to Meta and long known for maintaining Linux's RCU subsystem and the rcutorture test module. His career spans Sequent, SRI, IBM (where he was a Distinguished Engineer), and substantial open-source work improving SMP/NUMA scalability, scheduler behavior, and RCU correctness across kernel and userspace libraries. He holds a deep research and IP footprint—over 200 publications and more than 100 patents—and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering. Paul’s contributions to high-profile repos (including rockchip-linux/kernel and userspace-rcu) show a rare blend of formal modeling, race-condition fixes, and pragmatic kernel bug fixes that improve real-world stability and performance. Known for making parallel programming tractable, he pairs academic rigor with hands-on systems engineering, often surfacing subtle fixes like parity-flip synchronization and NMI-safe handling that prevent rare deadlocks. Based in Beaverton, Oregon, he combines long-term maintenance stewardship with ongoing innovation in scalability and real-time systems.
26 years of coding experience
34 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D., Computer Science and Engineering, Ph.D., Computer Science and Engineering at Oregon Health & Science UniversityBachelors, Mechanical Engineering, Bachelors, Mechanical Engineering at Oregon State UniversityChemeketa Community College
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (19)
concurrent10
system-programming10
memory-management10
c-programming10
c1110
linux-kernel10
scheduler10
c1710
kernel10
performance-optimization10
concurrency10
debug9
debugging9
multithreading9
debugprint9
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
rockchip-linux/kernel
Oct 2011 - Nov 2013
BSP kernel source
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:2 commits in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Paul primarily focused on kernel-level optimization and bug fixes within the Linux kernel source code. Their contributions addressed issues related to RCU (Read-Copy-Update) mechanisms, including handling page faults in NMI handlers and preventing deadlocks related to scheduler locks and interrupt disabling. They also worked on improving scheduler behavior by correcting assumptions in expedited scheduling and preventing IPIs to offline CPUs.
kernelkernel-sourcelinuxlinux-kernelbsp
AICP/kernel_leeco_msm8996
Sep 2014 - Jul 2015
Contributions:343 commits in 10 months
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