News: 0180130487

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Red Hat Losing Another Prominent Linux Kernel Engineer (phoronix.com)

(Tuesday November 18, 2025 @10:30PM (BeauHD) from the greener-pastures dept.)


Another highly influential Linux kernel engineer, David Hildenbrand, [1]is leaving Red Hat after a decade of major contributions to memory management, virtualization, and VirtIO. His recent kernel patch updates his maintainer info to a [2]kernel.org address , signaling his departure. He hasn't yet said where he's headed next. Phoronix reports:

> 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.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-David-H-Leaving

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


What am I supposed to do with this information? (Score:2)

by apparently ( 756613 )

Read the last decade of his git commits and honk off?

Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward

IBM employee. Might have been fired anyhow in their quarterly 30,000 person layoffs, unless your Hindi is good and you're willing to relocate.

Re: (Score:2)

by registrations_suck ( 1075251 )

I was wondering the same thing. Just......"and?"

Bluehat (Score:5, Insightful)

by abulafia ( 7826 )

I know a couple long-time Redhatters who left at various points during the digestion process.

I heard both unhappiness about how the company changed and unhappiness about IBM shafting the open source world from both of them.

I assume anything RH-branded is simply demoware now, and am leery of projects with too many redhat.com email addresses in the repo.

It was an excellent example of doing well by doing good for a long time.

My message is not that biological determinists were bad scientists or
even that they were always wrong. Rather, I believe that science must be
understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of
robots programmed to collect pure information. I also present this view as
an upbeat for science, not as a gloomy epitaph for a noble hope sacrificed on
the alter of human limitations.
I believe that a factual reality exists and that science, though often
in an obtuse and erratic manner, can learn about it. Galileo was not shown
the instruments of torture in an abstract debate about lunar motion. He had
threatened the Church's conventional argument for social and doctrinal
stability: the static world order with planets circling about a central
earth, priests subordinate to the Pope and serfs to their lord. But the
Church soon made its peace with Galileo's cosmology. They had no choice; the
earth really does revolve about the sun.
-- S. J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"