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AMD Closes OSRC, Lays Off Several Linux Kernel Developers

Posted by Unknown on from the reversal-of-fortunes dept.

From the H reporting on LinuxCon Europe comes news that several Linux kernel developers have been laid off by AMD as part of its workforce reduction. From the article: "OSRC staff primarily worked to develop the Linux support for AMD's server processors, but they also wrote code and extensions for related desktop and notebook CPUs – for example, they looked after the code to support CPU frequency scaling for the PowerNow and Turbo Core technologies. While working on the kernel's IOMMU and KVM support, one of AMD's former employees contributed to the development of the "IOMMU groups" feature that was integrated into Linux 3.6; this feature provides the basis for a new Linux 3.6 technology that allows a host's PCIe devices to be passed through to virtual machines and can also be used with Intel CPUs." Looks like the group was doing interesting research on hypervisors, lockless data structures, and multi-core synchronization primitives among other things. The Open Source Radeon driver developers are not affected by this at least.

6 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. I guess they don't want me to buy their products by h4rr4r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The AMD/ATI linux drivers suck, they are laying off their kernel folks, and no indication they have any plans to change. I hope they survive, but convincing me not to buy your products is not going to help.

  2. Not sure I understand... by Nemyst · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The server market, usually Linux-based, appears to be AMD's most stable market. Opterons are very often preferred over Xeons for a variety of reasons. So why exactly would AMD start axing developers in areas related to that? If anything, it'd make more sense to throttle down consumer processors and focus on graphics and server processors, no?

    1. Re:Not sure I understand... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I guess the problem is that the work of these guys affected real server performance in contrast to generic benchmarks. What they achieve is real life performance improvements in real applications running on Linux. But generic benchmarks rarely capture these advances, so their work has limited marketing value.

    2. Re:Not sure I understand... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'll agree with this. Under Linux, much of the performance edge for Intel chips over AMD chips disappear. But what websites have these benchmarks? Phoronix has some simple ones but nothing that relevant. So we end up with review after review of Windows + Games even though AMD server optimizations in Linux would make it a compelling purchase option IF PEOPLE FREAKING KNEW ABOUT IT!

  3. Too bad for AMD and all of us by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wish they'd start at the top... just look for the fuckers preparing their golden parachutes and sack them before they can deploy.

  4. Re:I guess they don't want me to buy their product by Grave · · Score: 5, Insightful

    AMD is betting the farm on ARM-64. If it fails to take off in the server world, there won't be anything left of the company. Too many cuts and too deep. The worst part of that is that not only would we lose competition in the x86 space, but graphics competition at the high end would also be gone (unless Intel starts working miracles).