Intel's Lead Developer Of Their Linux Vulkan Driver Has Left The Company

[smitty3268]

He posted a patch today relating to Android support. Although that's likely meaningless, and he's been looking over other unrelated patch series too.

[coder]

The most obvious choices would be NVIDIA or AMD or Google, but we'll see in the weeks ahead as it could also be an organization like Red Hat.

Heh, Imagination has open positions in their GPU driver team.

That said, I expect the answer is probably Amazon.

[CommunityMember]

Sounds like intel didn't pay him enough and someone poached him.

Intel pays competitively, and while there is always a chance that it was a (financial) offer he could not refuse, it is more likely it was a chance to work on something of interest.

There are heaps of jobs in this space now.

Especially for the well known highly qualified (and he is). From his post, he is excited to start his new position, and that is good for him.

[microcode]

Didn't Amazon publish a graphics development job recently?

There are heaps of jobs in this space now. Amazon is looking to use what Valve has made for SteamPlay, and what Google abandoned with Stadia, plus their massive AWS infrastructure, to make game streaming actually happen this time maybe.

[dmanlfc]

Didn't Amazon publish a graphics development job recently?

[rabcor]

Sounds like intel didn't pay him enough and someone poached him.

'irregardless' - he has put in the time and delivered some big wins for Linux graphics. If he chooses to work on proprietary firmware, he has earned the right to do so (at least in my book).

That really isn't a right you have to earn. Anyone can do whatever they want, we should just focus on being grateful to them for their contributions rather than making a big deal out of what they decide to do afterwards, it's hardly any of our business, although in this case it sounds like he's not gonna stop making contributions just yet.

[xhustler]

"Linux graphics space."

Hah!

Ekstrand only said that it would still be related to Khronos.

I'm hearing rumors that it's relating to Khronos' broadening of focus, and is about a Vulkan-style API for managing WiFi mesh networks, important for making sure that game streaming services get good latency, including for controller input.

There also seems to be a company called B******m involved, so it's possible that all of this will be locked away in proprietary firmware, and maybe the features will only be supported on Windows too...

So now he's going from a project where he was working alongside reverse-engineers to one where he has to try to protect the blobs from their tools?..

'irregardless' - he has put in the time and delivered some big wins for Linux graphics. If he chooses to work on proprietary firmware, he has earned the right to do so (at least in my book).

[rbmorse]

@#3---

"...So now he's going from a project where he was working alongside reverse-engineers to one where he has to try to protect the blobs from their tools?"

...similar to the way most of the world has always worked...

Maybe B******m has finally seen the advantages of open source and wants an experienced engineer to shepherd them through the transition?

[Quackdoc]

Can't wait to see what he will be working on next, whatever it is, it's probably going to be pretty cool

[danmcgrew]

@#3---

"...So now he's going from a project where he was working alongside reverse-engineers to one where he has to try to protect the blobs from their tools?"

...similar to the way most of the world has always worked...