The Kavy's

Sol Frank Kavy
sol@kavy.com / www.kavy.com

Ubicom - Chief Software Engineer 2/2002 – present

Active in setting strategy and direction for Ubicom, the leading provider of high quality/high performance Home Networking solutions. Our platform is the solution of choice in a broad range of devices including: Routers, Access Points, Bridges, Security Devices, Digital Picture Frames, and other home streaming media products. We have shipped more than 10 million units world-wide.

Participate in the design and development of Ubicom's next generation processor technology. Contributed to the design of the MMU, new instructions, performance improvements, and debugging enhancements that were incorporated into Ubicom’s processor designs.

Enabled our customers to take advantage of embedded open source software by porting SMP Linux to Ubicom's multi-threaded 32 bit micro-processor family. Member of a small group of individuals that have ported Linux to an entirely new architecture:

  • Improved SAMBA R/W performance through focus on system architecture, copy elimination and acceleration
  • Implemented Netfilters for NAT Type and Port Trigger
  • MMU: Software TLB implementation, ASID management, Fault handler
  • SMP: Locking primitives, atomic variables, logical CPU bring-up, Intra-Processor Interrupts
  • Timer Implementation, Watchdog implementation
  • Interrupt Management: Software Programmable Interrupt Controller, IRQ Management
  • Solved numerous application level issues:
  • Problems in VLC video playback
  • Multi-threading issues in iPod User Space Daemon
  • uClibc Implementation Issues
  • Taught classes on Ubicom32 architecture to both FAE and customers
  • Taught classes in user-space and kernel-space debugging
  • Branch and distribution management

Design and implemented custom RTOS (called ipOS) enabling the delivery of real-time products from Network Routers to Digital Pictures Frames. Designed and implemented numerous key technologies:

  • FAT File System, Drive Partition Manager, and Buffer Cache
  • Layer 2 Network Address Translation for wireless bridging / Layer 2 Switch / MAC filtering
  • MSFT Linker Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD)
  • Web page development for several embedded applications (Router, Bridge, …)
  • HTTP Infrastructure: HTTP Parser, HTTP Pool Manager, Web Server, Server Side Include parser
  • XML parsing infrastructure: Sax XML parser, SAX Filters, XPath parser, UPnP.
  • SMP lock primitives using strict ordering
  • Ported ipOS from 16 bit to 32 bit processor
  • Implemented Bluetooth LAP and PAN
  • DynDNS and DNS infrastructure
  • Re-implementation of Makefile structure and layout
  • Taught classes internally and externally on Ubicom32 architecture and ipOS internals

Kavy Consulting:  6/97 - 1/99, 2/2001 - 2/2002

Provided consulting/contracting in the areas of Project Management, Network Infrastructure, Corporate Security, Streaming Media Programming and Deployment, Web Design, and Web Programming. Projects Included:

  • C# - Desktop Phone Tools (Tapi based)
  • Multiple Web sites using Ajax and .NET technologies

Technologies: Network Equipment, Unix and NT Server Setup/Deployment, Exchange Server, DNS, WINS, Outlook, Java, JavaScript, Web Page Design, Database Design, SQL Server, TCP/IP, Direct Show, Windows Media Tools/Services, C#, .NET Services, Tapi.

iMonitoring.com - Co-founder and CTO 1/99 – 3/2001

Delivered the first end-to-end POTS based Internet Video Surveillance and Recording service.  The technology provides storeowners and managers with unprecedented access and control of their environment at an affordable price point. Designed and implemented core video technology including video service and user interface. Grew the team from inception to 12 engineers.

Technologies:  C++, Direct Show, Windows Format SDK, Windows Media Server, COM, Java, JDBC, Allaire JRUN, JMS, JavaScript, ActiveX,  IE, RADIUS, SQL Server

Motorola - Director Engineering 9/94 – 6/97

Delivered Motorola branded desk side server products 3 months after acquisition. Restructured the engineering organization and site to focus on a single business unit. Delivered the industry’s first PowerPC multimedia Windows/NT SMP workstations and servers. Built a strong team that was responsible for architecture definition, hardware bring-up, performance tuning, debugging, and software configuration.

EO, Inc.- Manager, Kernel Team 1/93 – 8/94

Ported GO's PenPoint Operating System to the AT&T Hobbit processor. Designed and implemented the ROM-based process execution model.   Facilitated the merger of GO and EO into a single company able to deliver products to the industry in less than 9 months.

Hewlett-Packard - System Architect 6/83 – 3/92

Led a team redesigning the virtual memory subsystem.  The VM system effectively supported a wide range of hardware features including: multi-processors, 64-bit addressing, global virtual address spaces, forward-mapped page tables, virtually indexed caches, large physical memories (4 Megabytes - 4 Gigabytes).

Hewlett-Packard representative to the POSIX P1003.1 and P1103.4 committees.

Datapoint Corporation - Member of the Technical Staff 6/81 – 6/83

Implemented an unencumbered copy utility from DOS to CP/M able to transfer and translate files dynamically.

Publications: ESC Conference Proceedings; Sept 2009; “Hardware I/O Controllers using Multi-threaded CPUs”.

Education: B.A., Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin, 1983. President student chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery.