Paul Cercueil joined Bootlin in 2026, working remotely from Madrid, Spain.

After graduating in 2014 from the Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard, Paul worked at Analog Devices Inc., designing and shaping the whole ecosystem around Linux’ IIO subsystem. He is the author of Libiio, which was subsequently used in many other projects, like GNU Radio, or Scopy, a software oscilloscope.

Linux Kernel experience

Paul is a Linux user and C programmer since about 2007. In 2010, while in university, he was tinkering with obscure handhelds running old vendor kernels, and decided that he could do something better. What followed was more than 750 patches upstreamed to the Linux kernel across the years, touching lots of different subsystems, bringing up support of Ingenic SoCs in the kernel almost from scratch. Paul is now the kernel maintainer for the Ingenic SoCs.

As part of his work at Analog Devices, he also contributed a DMABUF interface for the IIO subsystem, and for the USB/functionFS stack.

Buildroot experience

Paul is the co-author of the OpenDingux distribution, based on Buildroot, which was active between 2010-2020. Focused on gaming handelds, it had some (at that time) innovative solutions, like the OPK file format, where applications were self-contained in a single file, and installation was as simple as a drag-n-drop to the applications folder. Paul contributed 60+ patches to the upstream Buildroot project.

Misc. work

Alongside the Linux-related projects, Paul has been working on improving the KallistiOS project, an operating system for the SEGA Dreamcast. His work there extends many areas, from very low-level work (IRQ handling, scheduler, MMU) to things like CI and Makefiles.

Since 2014, he has also been working on-off on a MIPS-to-everything JIT compiler for Playstation 1 emulators, which he presented in two talks at FOSDEM 2025, and more recently on the Bloom emulator, which runs Playstation games on the SEGA Dreamcast.