About
Firmware Engineer, Quantum Networks · Mangalore, India
- Secure boot
- XDP and eBPF
- IPv6
- Self-hosting
I'm Abdul Wasey. I work on networks and firmware, which in practice means I spend my time somewhere between a bootloader and a routing daemon.
At Quantum Networks I work on secure boot for OpenWrt-based access points on Qualcomm platforms: verified boot in U-Boot, the signing pipeline behind it, and the recovery work for when a board no longer boots. Before that I was at Tata Communications on multi-link WAN failover and clustered virtualization, and I spent three years running infrastructure for IRIS at NITK, where I finished a B.Tech in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, which is not what I ended up doing.
More recently I have been working inside the Linux data path. xdp-bfd moves BFD failure detection into XDP so it keeps its timing under load that makes userspace daemons flap. Building it meant reading a lot of FRR's BFD daemon, which turned into six bug reports and three merged fixes.
Most of what I use, I host. Mail, DNS, photos, passwords, chat, and this site all run on a two-node cluster in my flat, and a good share of what I have learned about networking came from breaking it. I write that up when it seems useful, moderate r/dockerCE, and speak at FOSS United meetups now and then.
What I like working on
- Packet processing close to the metal, and the measurement that proves it works.
- Boot chains, signing, and the unglamorous business of trusting what runs.
- Systems that fail loudly rather than quietly doing nothing.
- Infrastructure small enough that one person can hold all of it in their head.
Contact
Email is [email protected]. I usually reply within a day.
I'm w453y nearly everywhere. Keybase if you want to verify those are all the same person.