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Evolution by committee: The changing face of PC storage 
With Alan Cox
The PC hardware and applications have changed enormously since the creation of Linux. From 250Kbyte/second polled disks on 4Mb machines we have moved to 50Mbyte/second or faster interfaces using bus mastering DMA to load 100Mbyte binaries into gigabyte machines. At the same time other things like disk seek time are little improved. This growing demand requires better algorithms, smarter hardware, more flexible driver interfaces and cleverer file systems. Even user space needs to change to get the best results from todays hardware.
Links
- Red Hat
- Home of the Linux kernel
- Wikipedia on Alan Cox
- Alan Cox on a Chip(TM) :-)
- Alans diary (in Welsh) (english version here) - and the truth from his wife Telsa
Alan Cox is a legend within the Linux
kernel development community, where he has earned a lot of respect.
Alan Cox was some years ago appointed by Linus Torvalds to maintain
the Linux Kernel 2.2 series. Alan Cox is today a fellow at Red Hat primarily
working as part of the kernel development community.