Intel Job Cuts Feared To Deliver A Critical Blow To Future Linux Projects
Intel has officially removed maintainers for multiple bits of software, with the latest being drivers for some of its older and lesser-known chips. To wit, the drivers fully losing support are Intel PTP DFL ToD, a time-of-day device on FPGA cards, and Intel WWAN IOSM, affecting M.2 modems and some Chromebook devices. Intel has long left this market, but some devices using the modems in question are still in the field.
Phoronix has been tracking these comings and goings quite closely. Drivers still supported but losing at least one maintainer include the Intel Ethernet RDMA, Keem Bay DRM, and T7XX 5G WWAN, all of which lost one or more maintainers. This is in addition previous restructuring changed the status of the Intel CPU Temperature and Intel WMI Slim BootLoader (SBL) drivers to "orphan," meaning they are still supported but have no assigned maintainers.
Even more recent hardware isn't safe to Intel's rotating chairs game, as the Gaudi AI accelerator driver maintainer has left the company, though they've been replaced as a maintainer and the driver still has support. However, Phoronix notes that the main kernel driver (upstream) still doesn't offer support for the latest Gaudi 3 hardware, and that Intel's promise to work more on this piece of software have yet to materialize. Finally, earlier in the month, Intel officially put the kibosh on Clear Linux OS.
While it can be argued that the deprecation or orphaning of most of these drivers has little to no impact on the grand scheme of things, the established pattern is definitely concerning, and quite illustrative of the penny-pinching afflicting the company. All the cuts in engineering jobs have to be leaving Intel in a difficult position for recovery, and dropping maintainers from the Linux kernel certainly doesn't inspire confidence that the company is dedicated to Linux support, something that may well hurt them in the long run.
