Primiano Tucci is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google with 15 years of systems and performance engineering experience, based in London. He leads and authors Perfetto, the widely used open-source tracing and profiling project for Android, Linux and Chrome, and has driven low-level back-end work to improve shared-memory handling, mmap-based trace processing, and ftrace support. His background spans deep systems work—crash-report minidump/microdump plumbing, kernel security tweaks for tracing services, and filesystem/COW contributions—reflecting strong competency in low-level C/C++ and cross-architecture platform code. A former PhD student in real-time embedded systems, he brings academic rigor to production engineering and has optimized tracing pipelines for large-scale, performance-sensitive environments. Notably, he moved core Perfetto components away from /dev/zero and added architectural support for multiple CPU families, showing a knack for both practical engineering and portability.
15 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
University of Bologna
Bachelor of Science, Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science, Computer Engineering at Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
Performance instrumentation and tracing for Android, Linux and Chrome (read-only mirror of https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/perfetto/)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:9 releases, 14 reviews, 2481 commits in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Primiano primarily contributed to the back-end side of the project by refactoring the code to migrate away from /dev/zero, adding mmap support for trace processing, and implementing various performance improvements. These changes involved modifications to the underlying codebase, including modifications to core functionalities like handling shared memory and reading/writing tracing data to support faster and more reliable trace processing. The user also added support for ftrace events.
Contributions summary:Primiano's contributions center around modifying the `init.rc` file to introduce a new property, `security.lower_kptr_restrict`, for adjusting kernel security settings. This involved adding conditional write operations to `/proc/sys/kernel/kptr_restrict` based on the property's value, which enables a tracing service to temporarily lower security restrictions. The user also contributed to code related to filesystem operations and COW (Copy-on-Write) functionality in the `fs_mgr` directory, specifically the `snapuserd` component. This encompassed merge operations and various test cases.
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.
Request Free Trial
Primiano Tucci - Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google