Richard Hughes
Project Leader at Linux Vendor Firmware Service
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Hughes is a veteran open source project leader with 26 years of experience designing and shipping low-level systems and firmware infrastructure from London. He created and maintains fwupd and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), a widely deployed update ecosystem that has delivered over 75 million firmware updates and sees millions of daily device checks. At Red Hat he drives upstream work across PackageKit, upower, colord and core RHEL infrastructure, while contributing stability and compatibility fixes to projects like Flatpak, GLib and flashrom. His background in electronic and computer engineering and early work on ColorHug hardware reflect a rare mix of embedded systems, security-conscious firmware design, and large-scale service operation. Colleagues know him for pragmatic, backward-compatible improvements—such as reproducible build timestamps and enhanced ABI handling—that quietly raise the reliability of Linux systems everywhere.
26 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Master’s Degree, Electronic and Computer Engineering, First With Distinction, Master’s Degree, Electronic and Computer Engineering, First With Distinction at University of Surrey
English
Github Skills (28)
system-programming10
intel10
api-design10
computer-architecture10
architecture10
firmware10
memory-management10
cpu-architecture10
software-update10
flatpak10
c1110
glib10
c1710
sys10
updater10
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
fwupd/fwupd
Feb 2015 - Jan 2023
A system daemon to allow session software to update firmware
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:53 releases, 7510 reviews, 6207 commits in 8 years
Contributions summary:Richard primarily worked on the firmware for the system daemon, fwupd, focusing on improving compatibility and functionality for Intel-based hardware. Their contributions include adding support for new devices and updating existing functionality within the system. The user also introduced and supported various features such as improved security updates.
firmwareupdateclinux
GNOME/glib
Jun 2009 - Jan 2019
Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:18 commits in 9 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily focused on enhancing the `glib` library's core functionality. They made several code changes, including allowing GCancellable to be subclassed by adding a private structure, fixing a typo in the g_variant_builder_add() documentation, and correcting annotations. They also introduced a new feature to GNetworkMonitor by adding network metered information and addressed PPC64-specific issues with the splice() function. This indicates a focus on improving the library's internal workings and compatibility across different systems.
glibgnome
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