It's been two months since there were any notable Intel Linux engineering departures to note following various layoffs and voluntary departures this year that have unfortunately impacted their Linux/open-source talent. Sadly this US Thanksgiving is a new departure to note: one of Intel's maintainers for the Xe open-source Linux kernel graphics driver is leaving the company. This is for the modern Xe driver used by default since Lunar Lake and playing a pivotal role for Intel Linux graphics moving forward.

Lucas De Marchi sent in the latest batch of Xe driver fixes today ahead of the Linux 6.18 stable release expected this weekend. In that Direct Rendering Manager pull request he noted:

"Here are the fixes towards 6.18. This is also my last pull request as xe maintainer as I'm leaving Intel. Patch to the MAINTAINERS files will be merged soon. Rodrigo and Thomas will continue sending the fixes if we don't have a release this week."

Lucas De Marchi is one of the three official Intel Xe kernel driver maintainers alongside Thomas Hellström and Rodrigo Vivi. Lucas De Marchi has been with Intel since 2013 working on their graphics software. Now sadly he's leaving Intel. It's not clear at this time if he's already found a new role elsewhere or what his next steps will be, but hopefully it's continuing to advance open-source Linux graphics software.

Thankfully there are the two other existing Intel engineers to continue on with serving as Xe driver maintainers and with this being their modern kernel graphics driver (as opposed to the older i915 code), it will continue to be a key focus for Intel moving forward.

Cheers to Lucas' contributions to the Xe kernel driver the past few years in making this very modern, more performant, cross-architecture friendly, future-focused open-source Intel graphics driver for both their current integrated and discrete graphics hardware.