With the recent Intel layoffs and early retirement / buyout packages, I have been curious to see what impact it will have on the open-source/Linux software engineers at the company. There's at least a few driver maintainers that have unfortunately departed the company but at least no major exodus of their well respected Linux software engineers.

Many of those leaving Intel as part of this latest round of cost-cutting measures did so at the end of last week or on Monday in closing out September. Unfortunately, there has been some impact to Intel's long-leading software efforts. I've heard from several Intel Linux engineers responsible from different oneAPI software components to device drivers that departed the company at the end of the month. It's been sad to see but at least Intel's been well stocked with talented Linux software engineers and this hopefully isn't going to cause any major shift in their typically great Linux support at launch (sans exceptions mainly on the client hardware side at times).

Besides from those that I've heard from in private, one of the indicators I've been on the lookout for over the past week has been the Linux kernel MAINTAINERS file being updated to reflect departing Intel engineers. There's been a few upstream Linux driver maintainers at Intel that indeed have left the company.

There was [1]a patch last week noting the maintainer of the Intel Analytics Accelerator (IAA) crypto drivr is retiring from Intel and now another engineer has taken over those duties.

Sent out on Monday was [2]a patch also changing responsibility for the maintainer of the Intel Management Engine (ME / MEI) driver for the Linux kernel. Another Intel engineer has stepped up to maintain the Intel ME Linux driver moving forward.

And then one of the maintainers of the Intel In-Field Scan (IFS) driver has also [3]left the company. He is still listed as one of the Intel IFS driver maintainers though but now using his personal email address.

Those three Intel driver maintainer updates are the main ones I've seen the past few days from looking out for Intel MAINTAINERS changes. We'll see if anymore trickle out over the coming days. There's also been other changes going back a bit further like [4]three Habana Labs driver maintainers so far this year. Over in user-space, over the summer we also saw [5]Intel discontinuing their SVT-HEVC project and in private I'm hearing there may be some user-space projects on the decline.

So there's been some impact on the Intel Linux software engineer side from the recent cost-cutting at Intel but it doesn't appear to be too widespread among the OSS/Linux ranks and hopefully won't have any measurable impact on their timely hardware enablement moving forward along with all of the other areas they invest in software like performance optimizations, kernel innovations, other tooling, etc. If I missed any other notable Intel Linux departures, feel free to contact me.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/9afce713-db32-487b-b79e-3b294500d8d4@linux.intel.com/

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240930090604.1788402-1-tomas.winkler@intel.com/

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20241001170808.203970-1-jithu.joseph@intel.com/

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/HabanaLabs-Maintainer-Leaving-2

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Discontinues-SVT-HEVC