Red Hat Picks Up Another Graphics Driver Developer

Red Hat has hired another well known name from the open-source Linux graphics driver community.

Rob Clark, the graphics driver developer from Texas Instruments that was part of the OMAP team and also collaborated with Linaro, has joined Red Hat. Rob Clark was the one largely responsible for the TI OMAP DRM/KMS driver, he's also proposed DRI2 Video, worked on Wayland video playback, and most recently began the Freedreno driver.

While at Texas Instruments he began reverse-engineering Qualcomm's graphics hardware. While Qualcomm is a TI competitor, he did this work in his spare time since Qualcomm's graphics IP isn't derived from PowerVR or any other IP where Rob has been tainted by NDAs or other agreements due to his TI employment. This reverse-engineering project has made great progress since its inception less than one year ago and the Freedreno Gallium3D driver is in good shape.

Rob Clark has left Texas Instruments in Texas to now go work for Red Hat at their Boston office. In talking with Rob earlier this month at FOSDEM 2013, he says at Red Hat he'll be working on general X.Org/Mesa/DRM code. For at least the moment, the Freedreno driver isn't part of his official duties at Red Hat.

Other prominent Red Hat developers working on the upstream open-source Linux graphics stack include Jerome Glisse, Ben Skeggs, and David Airlie.