Among the departed were several engineers who maintained critical drivers in the Linux kernel, and their exit has left those drivers officially orphaned.

Phoronix’s Michael Larabel spotted the damage after patches appeared on the public Linux kernel mailing list removing maintainer entries for developers no longer on Intel’s books.

The casualties include the Intel Ethernet RDMA driver, now left to a single engineer after the departure of Mustafa Ismail, and the Intel PTP DFL ToD driver, which lost Tianfei Zhang and now has no maintainer at all.

The Intel WWAN IOSM driver, kept alive by M Chetan Kumar for older systems, has been abandoned, while the Intel Keem Bay DRM driver is down to one co-maintainer after Anil S Keshavamurthy’s exit. Even the T7XX 5G WWAN driver lost both of its engineers in the bloodletting.

The result is that a swathe of personal and professional hardware could soon be flying without wings. Without new people stepping in quickly, and with a steep learning curve for anyone who does, some of these systems may lose reliable driver support entirely.

While Chipzilla is busy taking a scythe to its open-source contributors, AMD is heading in the opposite direction, loudly backing open-source development and keeping its Linux work well-resourced. For penguin-loving users who value long-term driver support, the AMD's approach might start looking more attractive than whatever Intel is offering.