The latest round of cost-cutting at Intel seems to be having a larger impact on their software engineering efforts than some of their previous rounds of layoffs. In addition to a prominent Linux kernel developer veteran leaving Intel last week where he worked for the past 14 years and responsible for many great upstream improvements, other Intel software engineers working on their Linux/open-source affairs have also been departing. In just the latest instance, one of the upstream Intel Linux kernel drivers is now “orphaned” due to the developer departing and no one experienced left to maintain the code.
Jithu Joseph who had been on the Intel Core Linux Kernel team the past decade announced yesterday on the Linux kernel mailing list that he will be leaving the company. He is currently the maintainer of the nifty In-Field Scan (IFS) driver for use with recent Intel Xeon processors for testing for silicon defects. Fortunately in that case another Intel Linux engineer has agreed to take over maintainership of the IFS Linux driver.
Jithu Joseph also serves as the maintainer of the Intel WMI Slim Bootloader “SBL” firmware update driver. But there that driver is now being set to “orphan” status within the mainline Linux kernel with no one immediately available to take over. Jithu commented on the maintainers file patch:
“- Remove myself as the maintainer for the Slim BootLoader (SBL) firmware update driver and mark it as Orphan. To the best of my knowledge, there is no one familiar with SBL who can take over this role.
These changes are being made as I will soon be leaving Intel.”
The Slim Bootloader is an Intel open-source project that is modular and designed to serve as a boot firmware for modern Intel x86 platforms. Development began for Apollo Lake and has come to various platforms since. The Slim Bootloader code at least for now is still being developed by Intel. Slim Bootloader has always been interesting from a technical and open-source perspective albeit not as much attention drawn to it in recent times and now with the latest Intel cost cutting we’ll see what happens.
The Intel WMI Slim Bootloader Firmware Update Driver is used for handling the secure and fail-safe firmware update handling for SBL-enabled Intel x86 platforms. So unfortunately for now it’s being orphaned in the mainline kernel with no one else stepping up at the moment to take over the code.
See the MAINTAINERS patch for the particular updates. There have also been some other unfortunate Intel Linux engineering departures too that will be covered separately on hearing back more details.
