Another Longtime Intel Linux Engineer Joins Google

Ben Widawsky who had been at Intel for the past seventeen years, most of which were spent improving their open-source Linux graphics driver as well as other Linux kernel contributions, has joined Google.

Ben Widawsky had been at Intel since 2005 ultimately working on their original Larrabee discrete GPU project and then their Linux graphics driver stack in general for a number of years.

His name may also ring a bell with Phoronix readers since in 2018 he shifted focus from the Intel Linux graphics driver to instead improve Intel support for FreeBSD and making various Intel hardware improvements for FreeBSD.

Most recently at Intel he was then working on the all-important CXL 2.0 support for Linux with a lot of work there.

He put down his CXL 2.0 work for Intel in May and then this month has now joined Google as a software engineer.

s/[email protected]/[email protected]/

— Ben Widawsky (@widawsky) July 14, 2022

He's one of several former Intel (graphics) engineers now working for Google, likely to be continuing his great contributions.

As for his CXL subsystem work, he noted, "I'm leaving Intel. Update email address to korg and add .mailmap entries. For now, I will be taking a reduced role in CXL development, but I still plan to spend time working on it, and I can still serve as a good substitute if needed for maintainer responsibilities (that may change in the future)." There still are other Intel engineers that will continue to be working on the CXL 2.0 support for the upstream kernel.