Richard Purdie
Fellow at OpenEmbedded
Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRichard Purdie is a veteran open-source engineer and founder-level technical lead with 26 years’ experience building and hardening Linux and embedded build systems, best known as the architect and founder of the Yocto Project and a Linux Foundation Fellow. He combines deep C and Python expertise with a specialty in debugging elusive build and runtime problems across diverse architectures and RTOS/Linux environments. His contributions to high-profile projects like BitBake, OpenEmbedded, Buildbot and the Linux Test Project focus on reproducible builds, dependency stability and eliminating race conditions—practical improvements that materially reduce CI flakiness. Based in Newcastle upon Tyne, he pairs low-level device-driver work (MTD, backlight/LED subsystems) with large-scale build-system engineering, and he often fixes issues others can’t reproduce by enforcing determinism in file ordering and packaging.
26 years of coding experience
MSci, Physics, MSci, Physics at Durham University
Github Skills (60)
dependency-management10
git10
rep10
gnu-make10
continuous-integration10
python10
gstreamer10
packaging10
configuration-management10
linux10
python-multiprocessing10
build-system10
cli-framework10
c1110
buildbot10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
openembedded/bitbake
Feb 2006 - Jan 2023
The official bitbake Git is at https://git.openembedded.org/bitbake/. Do not open issues or file pull requests here.
Role in this project:
Backend & Build Engineer
Backend & Build EngineerContributions:2964 commits in 17 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Richard Purdie primarily contributed to the build process and backend functionalities within the Bitbake repository. His commits focused on improving the build system's efficiency and stability, as evidenced by the optimization of task dependency handling and improvements to the code parser cache, directly impacting build times. He also demonstrated expertise in the internal workings of the build tool by addressing potential race conditions and inconsistencies in the build process, along with the addition of testing, including features like improved logging and more robust handling of exceptions. Purdie's contributions included enhancements for multi-configuration support and hash validation, ultimately leading to a more reliable and performant build system.
hacklangrustlibgit2pull-requestsis-git
openembedded/openembedded-core
Feb 2011 - Jan 2023
The official Git repository is at https://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6203 commits, 2 comments in 12 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Richard primarily worked on fixing issues related to the build process and dependency management within the openembedded-core repository. Their contributions involved addressing build failures by modifying code and adjusting configuration options to improve build reproducibility. They also addressed problems with specific packages, specifically those used to support running ptests. The user's focus was primarily on ensuring the integrity and reliability of the build system within the context of a large, complex project.
git-repositoryopenembedded
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