Following [1]prominent Linux x86 platform enabler Hans de Goede leaving Red Hat (as recently noted, he [2]recently joined Qualcomm ), there is another prominent Linux kernel engineer that will be departing from Red Hat.

David Hildenbrand landed a patch into yesterday's [3]Linux 6.18-rc6 kernel that acknowledges his departure soon from Red Hat.

Hildenbrand landed [4]a patch updating the mailmap file and MAINTAINERS entries to change over to his kernel.org emaila ddress rather than using his redhat.com email address. He notes in the commit message he will be leaving Red Hat and his RedHat.com email will only remain active until January.

David Hildenbrand serves as a reviewer for the HugeTLB code, s390 KVM code, and memory management reclaim code. He also serves as an upstream maintainer for the Linux kernel's core memory management code, Get User Pages (GUP) memory management code, kernel samepage merging (KSM), reverse mapping (RMAP), transparent hugepage (THP), memory advice (MADVISE), VirtIO memory driver, and VirtIO balloon driver.

Hildenbrand had been employed by Red Hat the past decade in Munich working on QEMU/KVM virtualization, Linux kernel memory management, VirtIO, and related low-level areas. Just this year alone so far in 2025 he's authored or been mentioned on more than one thousand mainline Linux kernel patches. He's now departing Red Hat and hasn't mentioned what's next for his Linux kernel opportunities.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hans-de-Goede-Leaving-Red-Hat

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hans-Joins-Qualcomm

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.18-rc6

[4] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=3470715e5c22578c6ea4098b256d5a904e12eef2