It was just two months ago that Oded Gabbay, the longtime maintainer of the Habana Labs kernel accelerator driver for Linux, announced he was stepping down from his software role and leaving Intel. Oded Gabbay was also a maintainer of the new Intel Xe kernel graphics driver. That was a surprising move with Oded Gabbay having been at Intel / Habana Labs for 7+ years and oversaw the creation of the Linux kernel's "accel" accelerator subsystem and more while prior to that having been at Red Hat and AMD. Ofir Bitton was named the Habana Labs driver maintainer following that but now he announced he too is leaving Intel.

Ofir Bitton who has been the Linux kernel software team leader at Intel Tel Aviv for the past four years -- and before that another four years as an Intel firmware engineer -- is going to be leaving the company. Bitton wrote on the mailing list today his pending departure from Intel and thus no longer serving as the Habana Labs accelerator driver maintainer:

"As I am about to leave Intel during the next weeks, I'm stepping down from the maintainer role of the habanalabs driver.

Yaron Avizrat from Intel will replace me as the new maintainer."

The reason for his departure wasn't shared. Yaron Avizrat is now taking over as the formal maintainer of the Habana Labs accelerator driver within the Linux kernel.

This latest shakeup comes as we are still waiting on seeing Gaudi 3 accelerator support within this open-source driver. With the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel there is a new Gaudi 2D variant with little public information on that but so far I haven't seen any upstream kernel patches for beginning to enable Gaudi 3 hardware.

The long-term future of the Habana Labs driver isn't entirely clear either with Intel focusing on their Falcon Shores chip for late 2025 as their next-gen AI and supercomputer chip coming out after Gaudi 3. Falcon Shores likely won't be leveraging the "habanalabs" accel driver while no other Habana Labs training or inference discrete accelerators have been announced yet. So we'll see how this driver plays out over the coming years with the Habana Labs line.