In the past few months at Intel between layoffs / corporate reorganizations and some deciding to pursue job opportunities elsewhere, there have been unfortunate impacts to their Linux engineering resources. Intel over the summer lost some prominent Linux engineering talent and in turn has even led to upstream Linux drivers being orphaned along with other driver maintainers departing and various other staffing changes. Unfortunate for Intel, another notable Linux name has left the company.
Colin Ian King announced today that it was his last day at Intel. Colin King had just been employed by Intel for nearly four years but is well known prior to then. Prior to joining Intel, Colin was a kernel engineer at Canonical where he worked on Ubuntu Linux for over 13 years. Colin King was well known for his Ubuntu Linux work and has contributed more than three thousand patches to the upstream Linux kernel over the years. At Intel, Colin continued his kernel contributions with performance optimizations and more.
If his name doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps you know it from Stress-NG with Colin being the lead developer of those kernel micro-benchmarks. Colin has made incredible contributions to the upstream Linux kernel community over the past many years.
Colin announced his departure from Intel today on LinkedIn:
In there he also announced he will now apparently be working for NVIDIA. For the benefit of the upstream Linux kernel community, hopefully he will be continuing to focus on upstream Linux kernel activity at NVIDIA… Especially given their increasing open-source GPU driver activity as well as growing kernel activity elsewhere from their networking products to other data center offerings and also needing to ensure the Linux kernel is performing effectively for showcasing the power of their products for AI and more.
