One of the latest departures from Intel amid their ongoing restructuring is the official maintainer of the “habanalabs” accelerator Linux kernel driver that provides support for their range of Gaudi AI accelerator products.
Current Habana Labs / Gaudi Linux driver maintainer Yaron Avizrat announced today on the Linux kernel mailing list that he is leaving Intel:
“As I am about to leave Intel, I’m stepping down from the maintainer role of the habanalabs driver.
Koby Elbaz & Konstantin Sinyuk from Intel will replace me as the new maintainers.”
Yaron Avizrat had been the “habanalabs” accelerator driver maintainer since last year when the former maintainer was leaving Intel. That prior maintainer was Ofir Bitton. Ofir Bitton had been the Habana Labs maintainer for just two months after longtime Intel / Habana Labs engineer and original driver lead developer Oded Gabbay announced he would be leaving Intel back in early 2024.
Now in a little more than one year we’re onto the fourth set of maintainership for this open-source Gaudi AI accelerator driver for the Linux kernel. But at least now there are two maintainers taking up the position.
Over the past year this Intel AI accelerator driver has been rather stagnant. Earlier this year they announced Intel would be working more on the Habana Labs Linux driver and that has yet to really materialize. Namely, the upstream open-source driver is still not supporting Intel’s latest Gaudi 3 accelerator hardware. That was expected to happen one year ago but there has yet to be any upstream driver support for the latest Gaudi 3 hardware in the Linux kernel. The Gaudi 3 support so far appears to be just relegated to some downstream packages offered by Intel.
With the ongoing layoffs/restructuring at Intel, this isn’t the only upstream Linux driver maintainer change. Some of the other recent shakeups were noted within Additional Intel Linux Drivers Left Orphaned & Maintainers Let Go.
