Adding to the unfortunately long list of unfortunate Intel Linux/open-source setbacks over the past year, yet another Intel Linux software engineer that was an upstream Linux kernel driver maintainer has departed Intel.
Jarkko Nikula is the latest Intel Linux engineer leaving Intel. Appearing today in a patch message:
“Jarkko’s address is going to bounce soon and I agreed to be the new maintainer.”
This particular patch was for the Intel Quadrature Encoder Peripheral “QEP” driver. Intel QEP was found back on Elkhart Lake and is still being maintained with Intel engineer Ilpo Järvinen now stepping up to oversee the driver.
Jarkko Nikula’s LinkedIn profile indicates he left Intel in September. Jarkko Nikula had been with Intel since 2013 as a Linux kernel software engineer and prior to that was a Jolla engineer working on the Linux-based Sailfish OS.
Beyond the Intel QEP driver, Jarkko Nikula was heavily involved in other Intel open-source drivers over the years. Just last month some of his final patches at Intel were enabling Wildcat Lake U support within the i2c and MIPI i3c drivers. He also did the enabling of Panther Lake, Arrow Lake H, and other Intel support mostly in the i2c and i3c subsystems.
This Gitweb search shows the hundreds of Linux kernel patches he contributed to the upstream Linux kernel from his Intel email address over the past decade.
