Well, it’s an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel’s corporate-wide restructuring. Just after writing about Intel’s CPU temperature monitoring driver now left unmaintained/orphaned, more patches hit the public Linux kernel mailing list to mark additional Intel drivers as orphaned and removing maintainer entries for Linux developers no longer at Intel.
One of the new patches today drops one of the maintainers of the Intel Ethernet RDMA driver. The Intel Ethernet RDMA driver is still maintained as one other Intel engineer was serving as co-maintainer but Mustafa Ismail is no longer at Intel.
One of the other Linux drivers now orphaned is the Intel PTP DFL ToD driver. This follows other recent Intel FPGA DFL maintainer changes. The Intel FPGA DFL ToD driver is for the time-of-day device on their FPGA cards. This patch marks the Intel PTP DFL ToD driver as orphaned with Tianfei Zhang no longer at Intel.
The Intel WWAN IOSM driver is one of the other drivers now orphaned by today’s patches. This comes as maintainer M Chetan Kumar is no longer at Intel. Intel exited the WWAN and modem business several years ago so this orphaning isn’t entirely surprising but unfortunate for anyone that might still have an Intel M.2 modem in use. This driver was in use by some Chromebook devices too beyond conventional Linux laptop/desktop use. The driver is being left in the kernel for now at least but could be subject to bit-rot and eventual removal without anyone left maintaining it.
Another patch drops one of the Intel Keem Bay DRM driver maintainers as no longer at the company but there was another co-maintainer listed. Intel had an engineer helping to maintain the Linux kernel’s Kprobes code but that too is no more with Anil S Keshavamurthy no longer at Intel to oversee the kernel probes code to help with debugging and performance profiling.
Intel also had two engineers working on the T7XX 5G WWAN driver but that too is no more here and here.
Those are the latest maintainer file patches from Intel today and hopefully the last of it.
