Intel Ramps Up Linux Investment By Acquiring Linutronix

Intel has a very exciting acquisition to announce this morning - not another hardware company, but they have acquired Linutronix to ramp up their investment in Linux/open-source engineering.

Intel has acquired Linutronix, the German-based Linux consulting firm focused on embedded Linux and real-time computing. Intel's acquisition of Linutronix appears to be primarily focused as an acqui-hire with getting Linutronix's very talented staff at Intel. Among the prominent Linutronix engineers is their CTO Thomas Gleixner as a longtime kernel maintainer and important contributor on the x86 side, including with Linux's CPU security mitigations and perhaps most notably for the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) work.

Linutronix has led Linux's work on PREEMPT_RT/real-time work albeit funding previously was a challenge - this shouldn't be a case now thankfully due to Intel's deep resources.

Intel's acquisition of Linutronix is great news for real-time kernel prospects. Back in 2020 getting PREEMPT_RT merged to the mainline Linux kernel was held up due to a lack of funding. Now with Linutronix being part of Intel, hopefully one of their first efforts will be on getting the real-time patches upstreamed. Intel in alerting me to today's announcement was quick to reaffirm Linutronix's work on PREEMPT_RT. We've seen more PREEMPT_RT patches work their way upstream over the past year while now under Intel will hopefully soon cross the finish line.

This is great news for the Linux and open-source ecosystem.

Intel has publicly confirmed their Linutronix acquisition in a blog post.

By acquiring Linutronix, we are deepening our long-standing relationship with a highly respected team of globally recognized Linux experts, adding to the remarkable breadth and depth of Intel’s hardware and software talent. Linutronix will continue to operate as an independent business within our software division, led by Egger and Gleixner.

I look forward to working together with the entire Linutronix team to unlock the opportunities in front of us as we pursue our common vision of a strong open ecosystem built on Linux.

This is a great move by Intel for furthering their contributions to the Linux / open-source world.