Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Certification
Patents
Ideas
Timeline
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Irfan Ulla Khan

Irfan Ulla Khan

System Software Engineer
Bangalore

Summary

  • 18 years’ experience in IT and Software development. Working in Kernel, hypervisor/Virtualization, and x86 architecture for the past 17+ years.
  • In VMware, I was part of the ESXi hypervisor team for more than a decade, mainly working on update and patch releases of VMKernel core components(link). Currently working in Bedrock Ultravisor team contributing to virtual machine monitor of NOVA hypervisor.
  • My area of expertise is mainly in logging components, platform support for a programming language, memory management, and in-depth kernel core dump analysis.
  • Well-versed understanding of AMD and Intel(3A,3B,3C) architectures manuals. Basic understanding of UEFI, ACPI, PCIe, IOMMU/VT-d specifications. Received several appreciations(link) for my performance, technical excellence, customer champion, and mentoring outcomes.
  • I have worked with industry experts from companies like Intel, AMD, HP, and Dell to resolve some of the critical issues in drivers, firmware, and microcode.
  • Good conceptual knowledge of x86/AMD64 arch, VT-x/AMDv, APIC, IOMMU, VT-d, EPT/NPT, AVIC/vAPIC, SRIOV, Scalable IOV, and other hardware-assisted virtualization features(link).

Overview

18
18
years of professional experience
5
5
years of post-secondary education
3
3
Certifications

Work History

System Software Engineer

BedRock Systems
05.2022 - Current
  • UltraSpaces: worked on per vCPU EPTs for strong isolation of containers in a Virtual Machines.
  • Virtual CPUID and MSR support for the Virtual Machines.

Sr. Member of Technical Staff

Nutanix R&D
Bangalore
10.2020 - 05.2022
  • Worked on adding virtual TPM device feature to AHV.
  • Handling internal QE and customer reported issues on hypervisor/kernel.
  • Exploring the internals on OpenSource components like KVM, QEMU, libvirt, swtpm, Linux kernel, etc…
  • As stratego, my responsibility is to prioritize different activities, ranging from feature developments to bug fixes, to subset them for update and patch releases.

Staff Engineer

VMware R&D
Bangalore
06.2009 - 10.2020
  • 24TB physical memory support in the ESXi hypervisor.
  • vmsyslog: Audit records functionality for ESXi.
  • Automated Diagnostics Services for ESXi crashes.
  • Golang runtime for VMKernel with GOOS target as ‘esx’.
  • I have fixed several complex/catastrophic issues in core ESXi kernel.

Senior Software Engineer

NTT Data
Bangalore
02.2006 - 05.2009

Developing the test guest modules to check various functionality of Ultravisor (sPAR hypervisor kernel) which includes the following areas.

  • Developed x64 memory management module i.e. IA32e mode paging.
  • Ported several 32-bit modules to 64-bit mode.
  • Have worked extensively on Intel's Architecture in the areas of interrupt handling, paging, MSR, LAPIC, CPUID, and Control registers.
  • Worked on Intel hardware-assisted virtualization technology.

Education

Bachelor of Science - Information science and Technology

Vishveshwariah Technological University
09.2001 - 08.2005

Advanced Software Systems - Graduate Certificate

Stanford University
California
09.2015 - 08.2016

Skills

    Kernel, System Software, Hypervisors, Virtualization

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Certification

Hypervisors: VMware ESXi , Linux KVM, sPAR and NOVA.

Patents

  • “Implementing pseudo non-masking interrupts behavior using a priority interrupt controller" - US Grant: US9952895B2
  • “Nested Hypervisor to run Virtual Machines on public clouds” - US grant: US10747562B2
    Research Papers:
    • ADS: Automated Diagnostics Services for ESXi crashes.
    • Golang runtime for ESXi hypervisor.

Ideas

 Delivered several new product ideas in Tech hackathons:

- “Microvisor as nested hypervisor”, 2016, Judge’s Choice Award.

- “Securely enable debug terminal on hung systems”, 2015, Judge’s Choice Award.

- “Make Virtual machines resilient to server crash”, 2013, People’s Choice Award. 

Timeline

System Software Engineer

BedRock Systems
05.2022 - Current

Sr. Member of Technical Staff

Nutanix R&D
10.2020 - 05.2022

Advanced Software Systems - Graduate Certificate

Stanford University
09.2015 - 08.2016

Staff Engineer

VMware R&D
06.2009 - 10.2020

Senior Software Engineer

NTT Data
02.2006 - 05.2009

Bachelor of Science - Information science and Technology

Vishveshwariah Technological University
09.2001 - 08.2005
Irfan Ulla KhanSystem Software Engineer