Intel's unprecedented crisis deepens with over 24,000 global layoffs confirmed this year as part of a brutal workforce reduction.
The turmoil extends to leadership, with CEO Lip-Bu Tan facing Trump administration pressure for resignation over alleged China connections. Sadly, these turbulences now jeopardize Intel's Linux ecosystem contributions.
Critical Intel Linux Drivers Abandoned
These layoffs have hit Intel's Linux kernel efforts hard. Several drivers that handle basic hardware functions no longer have anyone maintaining them.
The biggest concern is the coretemp driver, which monitors CPU temperatures on Intel processors. Fenghua Yu, who maintained it for years, has left Intel for NVIDIA. There's no replacement maintainer lined up for this critical driver, and without it, users could lose temperature monitoring on upcoming Intel chips.
Other drivers are also affected. The Ethernet RDMA driver lost one maintainer but still has another. The WWAN driver for M.2 modems is completely abandoned.
Intel's FPGA time-of-day driver also has no maintainer now. The company lost its contributor to Linux's Kprobes debugging tools too. These drivers will start breaking as Linux development progresses. No one will be around to fix bugs or add support for new hardware.
If Intel doesn't do anything soon, this will further hurt its reputation. The company is known for solid Linux support. Plus, this makes them look unreliable in the long run.
If they aren't up to the task, then the Linux community might have to step up (though there's no guarantee if anyone will) and maintain these orphaned drivers or watch them slowly become obsolete.
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Sourav Rudra
