Red Hat Losing Another Prominent Linux Kernel Engineer

Another highly influential Linux kernel engineer, David Hildenbrand, is leaving Red Hat after a decade of major contributions to memory management, virtualization, and VirtIO. His recent kernel patch updates his maintainer info to a kernel.org address, signaling his departure. He hasn't yet said where he's headed next. Phoronix reports: David Hildenbrand serves as a reviewer for the HugeTLB code, s390 KVM code, and memory management reclaim code. He also serves as an upstream maintainer for the Linux kernel's core memory management code, Get User Pages (GUP) memory management code, kernel samepage merging (KSM), reverse mapping (RMAP), transparent hugepage (THP), memory advice (MADVISE), VirtIO memory driver, and VirtIO balloon driver.

Hildenbrand had been employed by Red Hat the past decade in Munich working on QEMU/KVM virtualization, Linux kernel memory management, VirtIO, and related low-level areas. Just this year alone so far in 2025 he's authored or been mentioned on more than one thousand mainline Linux kernel patches.

What am I supposed to do with this information?

[apparently]

Read the last decade of his git commits and honk off?

Re:What am I supposed to do with this information?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM employee. Might have been fired anyhow in their quarterly 30,000 person layoffs, unless your Hindi is good and you're willing to relocate.

Re:

[reynolds_john]

About 33% of IBM's employees are in India currently. Estimates show that IBM employs less than 100,000 people in the United States, down from ~ 134,000 in 2007... and continues that downward trend. IBM has an estimated 10 times more job openings in India than the United States in March 2025. Stats show September 2025 job openings as follows: India 2400+, USA 400+, UK 125+.

I'm not sure the author was incorrect in describing the best path to get hired by IBM at this time?

Re:

[registrations_suck]

I was wondering the same thing. Just......"and?"

RedHat's loss of essence

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I-I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence."

Bluehat

[abulafia]

I know a couple long-time Redhatters who left at various points during the digestion process.

I heard both unhappiness about how the company changed and unhappiness about IBM shafting the open source world from both of them.

I assume anything RH-branded is simply demoware now, and am leery of projects with too many redhat.com email addresses in the repo.

It was an excellent example of doing well by doing good for a long time.

Re:

[MemoryDragon]

IBM stays IBM, I feared that in the long run the aquision will be the end of Redhat, it is happenning now as it seems.
IBM is a shithole employer and has been for decades!

Re:

[nightflameauto]

IBM stays IBM, I feared that in the long run the aquision will be the end of Redhat, it is happenning now as it seems. IBM is a shithole employer and has been for decades!

RedHat won't die. They'll live on as a zombie version of what Linux is, sucking up licensing fees and being shittier and shittier each iteration for decades to come. That's the IBM way.

Re:

[bferrell]

Look at his area of work... Low level virtualization
I'm betting on a vmware replacement or a company that uses that technology.
There are several that come to mind right off the top of my head.
Oracle isn't really one of them.
They have VirtualBox

The real question

[PetiePooo]

How soon will Lennart Poettering be leaving?

(For those new to Linux, he's the biggest proponent of systemd, the init system that is the antithesis of Unix's storied tradition of "do one thing and do it well.")

Re:

[tbuskey]

How soon will Lennart Poettering be leaving?

(For those new to Linux, he's the biggest proponent of systemd, the init system that is the antithesis of Unix's storied tradition of "do one thing and do it well.")

He left Red Hat for Microsoft in 2022...