Linux kernel programmer, Linutronix, Germany

Thomas Gleixner has a long and successful history of system and application programming of industrial devices and machines. He is one of the managers of the Linutronix company which co-founded OSADL in 2005.

Since 2000, he is increasingly contributing to the Linux kernel. His master piece is the high-resolution timer project that got fully merged into the mainline Linux kernel version 2.6.24 in February 2008. Another very important project is to bring realtime capabilities to the mainline Linux kernel. This is done using the so-called Realtime-Preempt patches (aka PREEMPT_RT). Thomas is maintaining and developing them together with Ingo Molnár and Steven Rostedt. The first part of the Realtime-Preempt patches went mainline in summer 2006; their complete merge is expected until the end of 2010.

Last not least, Thomas initiated the architecture merger of Intel's 32- and 64-bit processors. He is now (together with Ingo Molnár and H. Peter Anvin) maintainer of the newly created common Intel architecture branch (x86).