Steven is mostly involved in the Real Time patch of the Linux kernel. He has been actively hacking the kernel for 10 years, but mostly on the Real Time variants. In Real Time, high latencies need to be removed as much as possible to ensure faster response times for critical tasks. To investigate sources of latencies within the kernel, Steven has worked with and developed several methods of tracing the kernel. Working on his own Logdev kernel tracer as well as the soon to be mainline ftrace, he has solved several hard to find causes of latencies as well as some really nasty deadlocks.