The layoffs and restructuring at Intel in 2025 caused unfortunate hits to their Linux/open-source engineering including various driver maintainers leaving and even their CPU temperature driver being orphaned for lack of maintainers. Sent out today were a number of additional updates to the MAINTAINERS file for the Linux kernel to reflect other Intel departures in recent months. Plus some of the Altera drivers have also been orphaned now for having no upstream maintainers.
Longtime Intel Linux engineer Dave Hansen sent out the latest round of patches today to reflect various upstream Linux kernel maintainers/reviewers that have left Intel. These are departures in recent months but not necessarily very recent; just the routine cycle of seeing what Linux @intel.com email addresses are now bouncing.
There is now one less maintainer for the IAA crypto driver but at least two Intel engineers remain there. Kanchana Sridhar had been involved in the Linux IAA accelerator efforts but her email is now bouncing. She had worked at Intel since 1992 besides a brief stint at Synopsys in the late 2000s. At least two maintainers for that important driver remain.
Meanwhile Intel engineer Isaac Hazan left Intel back in September and was the sole Thunderbolt DMA traffic test driver maintainer. That testing driver for Thunderbolt DMA traffic handling is now marked as orphaned with no one currently maintaining the code.
One of the Keem Bay DRM driver maintainers has also left the company.
Meanwhile the Altera drivers have been orphaned for the Altera PCIe IP as well as the PCI MSI driver. Intel sold off a 51% controlling stake in Altera last year to the Silver Lake private equity firm to become its own independent organization.
There was also an Intel engineer as a code reviewer for the Mediatek T7XX 5G WWAN modem driver who is no longer at the company.
