Adding to the unfortunate engineering setbacks at Intel this year as part of cost-cutting measures, the Intel IWD software development has been on a hiatus for the past three months. Going from previously seeing monthly releases and almost constant activity to now development ceasing up with no activity in the past three months.
Over the past three months a number of Phoronix readers have written in with concern around IWD, the Intel software project that they open-sourced back in 2016 with the intent of serving as a replacement to WPA_Supplicant. Over the past decade it’s seen a lot of growth with new features added, adoption by various Linux distributions, and overall rigorous development up until three months ago. This wireless daemon has worked out very well on modern Linux systems.
Per the Git tags, IWD would see releases at least once a month up until last year. Then it turned to a release once every month or two and less frequent Git activity in general… And then in late September, IWD 3.10 released with a few fixes.
Since that 3.10 release in late September, there hasn’t been any new Git activity at all to the Intel iNet Wireless Daemon project.
Several Phoronix readers have been written in about the lack of IWD activity and I’ve been holding out hope that it was just a brief pause, but now here we are three months later without any Git activity to this very practical open-source project. I’m awaiting to hear from Intel with any official word on the status of the project, but it doesn’t look good as another open-source setback at the company. That last Git activity just occurred before word of Intel shifting their open-source focus to make their contributions more directly benefit them rather than their competitors. Unfortunate for that ethos, IWD benefits all WiFi/wireless Linux users regardless whether using an Intel WiFi adapter or an alternative chipset.
