Who is With Kolivas?

Con Kolivas is an anesthesiologist and self-taught programmer Australian who has done important work in the world of free software.

Despite his great contributions, Kolivas has been very secretive about his life and private activities, but this does not detract from his achievements. Below, we are going to go over some of them and why they are relevant to Bitcoin and the blockchain.

Beginnings in Free Software development

Kolivas was initially known for his work on the Linux kernel. They started in 2004 when I was a programmer for it. These include a number of improvements to the Linux kernel's scheduler. But differences with the kernel development team led him away from the project in 2007.

After this, Kolivas started a parallel development of the kernel, where he applied his improvements freely, giving rise to the modification project that receives the name of patchset -ck or linux -ck. These modifications include improvements to the Linux kernel schedulers in order to increase performance, in particular by reducing the impact of input and output operations, and latency.

Thanks to these improvements, the performance of the Linux kernel in desktop environments increases substantially, and that is why Kolivas is highly respected within the GNU / Linux community. But his ideas and contributions in this community do not stop at the kernel. Kolivas also has a number of other projects like; Interbench, lrzip, Contest, KernBench e idlerun. Each of them cWith a specific utility and capacity, which often leaves behind similar projects.

With Kolivas, creator of the cgminer project

However, Kolivas also made great contributions to blockchain technology, especially to help its expansion. This is how on July 13, 2011, Kolivas using his username -ck en Bitcointalk ad launching your project cgminer. In the opening message, Kolivas commented exactly, the following:

This is the official thread for the support and development of cgminer, a Bitcoin miner ASIC written in C, with cross-platform support for Windows, Linux, OSX and others, with monitoring, speed control and remote interface capabilities. There is no SUPPORT for CPU, GPU or altcoin mining in this thread, no previous versions with that functionality, nor support for unofficial forks of this code.

With Kolivas

Presentation of the cgminer project in Bitcointak - 2011

The cgminer legacy for cryptocurrency mining

With cgminer, Kolivas managed to give a huge boost to the development of software for miners ASIC. The project allows the modification of these miners to improve their performance. Something unique and possible thanks to the high optimization and diversity of features it has cgminer. Furthermore, the development of this software was the beginning of a series of compatible projects, which benefited from the high optimization achieved by Kolivas.

Among the projects that improved their technology thanks to cgminer can be mentioned:

1. ccminer:  Miner specialized in GPU Nvidia and CUDA, which took advantage of latency optimizations to improve GPU mining performance.
2. cpu miner: Minero CPU. He took cgminer examples to improve low latency multitasking and improve the efficiency of the mining is..
3. Xilinx company that created the FPGA He used the project as the basis for his mining software. In fact, Kolivas software supports various mining FPGAs.

Today, cgminer es still a project with great activity, and that can be used to mine Bitcoin  y Litecoin. In fact, many miners and farms use their software or base their mining systems on the work done by Kolivas. All this, in order to improve the performance of their machines. Well, after all, the higher the performance, the better the profits, and that for a miner is the most important thing.