Alan Maguire
Senior Principal Engineer at Oracle
Dublin, Dublin 1, Ireland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlan Maguire is a Senior Principal Engineer based in Dublin with over two decades of systems and networking experience and nine years focused on Linux kernel networking. He specializes in BPF, observability, network performance and test-driven development for kernel code, often implementing low-level tracing and perf-based profiling as seen in contributions to projects like ply and libbpf. At Oracle he drives kernel and cloud network engineering efforts, combining practical OS engineering with machine learning techniques to improve observability and testing. His background spans Solaris networking and ZFS appliance networking work, and he brings a rare mix of deep C/kernel skillset plus productivity in Go, Python and scripting for CI and debugging. Colleagues rely on him for making kernel telemetry robust and for reducing invasive tracing overhead while preserving actionable insights.
9 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BSc, Computer Science, BSc, Computer Science at University College Dublin
English, French
Github Skills (13)
c1710
libbpf10
kernel10
packet10
performance-analysis10
c1110
trace10
linux-kernel10
tracer10
filter10
ebpf10
bpf10
system-programming9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
libbpf/libbpf
Apr 2019 - Oct 2022
Automated upstream mirror for libbpf stand-alone build.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 commits, 1 comment in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Alan primarily contributed to the `libbpf/libbpf` repository by modifying and extending the BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) related functionalities. Their work involved fixing whitespace issues, syncing header files, adding new BPF helpers like `bpf_seq_printf_btf` and `bpf_snprintf_btf`, and supporting typed data dumps. The user also made improvements to the BTF (BPF Type Format) dumper and uprobe attach functionalities, making them more robust.
libbpfbpftracing
wkz/ply
Jan 2018 - Mar 2018
Light-weight Dynamic Tracer for Linux
Role in this project:Backend Engineer
Backend EngineerContributions:8 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Alan significantly contributed to the "ply" project, a dynamic tracer for Linux, by adding support for a profile provider. This involved enabling profile events via PERF_TYPE_SOFTWARE and PERF_COUNT_SW_CPU_CLOCK, along with integrating kprobes to catch profile events in the kernel context. The changes included the creation of a profile provider, defining structures and functions to handle perf events, and the integration of kprobes for profiling on a per-CPU or all-CPU basis. The user also addressed symbol resolution issues and implemented basic u[ret]probe support, and made improvements to reduce global enable/disable of tracepoints.
linux
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