Intel has successfully poached some open source veterans from the likes of Apple and Netflix in recent weeks in an effort to clean up the Linux kernel and re-establish dialogue with the open source community. "I'm attracting some of the best people in the business," Intel CTO Greg Lavender said in a recent news conference. "They're leaving big companies and coming to Intel because... [CEO Pat Gelsinger] and I are working on the Drive our software-first commitment. Our open source commitment is back."
Last month, Intel hired Arun Gupta, formerly at Apple, as its vice president and general manager of open ecosystems, The New Stack notes. Soon after, Brendan Gregg, a Linux performance tools expert who had worked at Netflix, was hired as an Intel researcher. Currently, Intel has a total of 17,000 software engineers and remains one of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel. The company relies heavily on the open-source community to develop the underlying software so it can sell more chips to businesses.
Lavender revealed that while Intel has distanced itself from the open source community in recent years, they plan to resume public engagement and dialogue with the open source community soon. The company has previously reached out to the open source community through its Open Source Technology Center and website 01.org, but these sites are currently dormant. And Imad Sousou, who led the company's open-source efforts, left Intel in 2020.
Intel said its priority is to clean up the Linux kernel to support new types of computing driven by applications such as artificial intelligence. Some specific Linux distributions still support the 1999 x86 architecture and hardware, and now is the time to clean up the code and add support for newer hardware, Lavender said. The company is trying to fix types of issues like thread locking that cause wasted CPU cycles and excessive energy usage. " I think the whole industry can contribute a lot of better quality building in the open source ecosystem. "
Earlier this year, Intel also acquired German open source company Linutronix; at the same time, it absorbed Thomas Gleixner, its founder who is active in the open source community. Linutronix is the architect of the PREEMPT_RT patchset . The patch set, which allowed the Linux kernel to prioritize real-time applications, has been shelved for about 20 years due to a lack of developers and funding; Intel's addition will help boost its development in the Linux kernel.
"We want to push more real-time Linux capabilities because it's a good investment for the edge and the automotive industry," Lavender said. "As we make those investments, we want to monetize the top of the stack."