In addition to some Intel Linux kernel drivers being “orphaned” following the corporate restructuring at Intel between developers being laid off and others deciding to pursue opportunities elsewhere, these changes have also led to a number of Intel-related software packages within Debian being orphaned. In turn these Intel packages are also relied on by Ubuntu and other downstream Debian Linux distributions.
Around one dozen Intel packages within the Debian archive were recently orphaned, a.k.a. now being unmaintained following developer departures from Intel with no one currently taking up the new responsibility, with also needing to be a Debian Developer or Debian Maintainer to contribute.
Among the Intel-related packages within Debian to recently be marked as orphaned include:
accel-config – The package for configuring the Intel Data Streaming Accelerators “DSA” IP on recent Xeon processors. This is needed for properly configuring the DSA accelerators from user-space for interfacing with the kernel drivers.
qatengine – Intel QuickAssist Technology OpenSSL engine support.
qatlib – The QuickAssist Technology library for making use of that hardware acceleration for offloading security, authentication, and compression services.
qatzip – The Zip library utilizing QAT.
intel-cmt-cat – The cache monitoring and configuration of Intel Cache Monitoring Technology, Memory Bandwidth Monitoring, and Cache Allocation Technology.
intel-lpmd – The Intel Low Power Model Daemon for optimizing active idle power on Intel systems.
ipp-crypto – The Intel Cryptography Primitives Library.
intel-ipsec-mb – Intel Multi-Buffer Crypto for IPSec.
numatop – Intel’s NumaTOP observation tool.
psst – Intel’s Power Stress and Shaping Tool (PSST).
thermald – The Intel Thermal Daemon.
thunderbolt-tools – Thunderbolt / USB4 debugging tools.
These packages were all orphaned last month and haven’t seen anyone stepping up to maintain them for Debian either from Intel Corp or other interested Debian developers from the community or other organizations. This follows some Intel drivers in the upstream Linux kernel being orphaned like the Intel CPU temperature monitoring driver and Intel also having recently ended open-source projects like the x86-simd-sort library and the sad demise of Clear Linux.
With the user-space accelerator packages like QAT and DSA being impacted as well as various other Intel libraries and even NumaTOP and other utilities, this could pose a problem if no one steps up to maintain these packages long-term. Again, not only Debian itself being affected but also Ubuntu and other downstream Debian-based Linux distributions. This is a set-back for a nice out-of-the-box experience for Intel hardware on Debian/Debian-derived operating systems and could make it more difficult to leverage Intel accelerators moving forward if having to either run the outdated packages, build your own code from source, or relying on generic packages from Intel.com where available. Hopefully this lack of Intel maintainership to these Debian packages can be rectified soon.
