One Of Imagination's Only Mesa Developers Has Jumped Ship To Intel

The only developer from Imagination Technologies that was active in contributing to Mesa has left the company and is now working for Intel's open-source graphics team.

For those holding out hope to one day see a complete open-source PowerVR Linux graphics driver, those days look incredibly less likely now with their main Mesa contributor no longer at the company. If you forgot, back around 2015 is when there was actually some hope of seeing an official open-source PowerVR Linux driver backed by Imagination Tech. Alexandru Voica who worked in marketing at the company though is no longer working for them had alluded to open-source driver work as well as their struggles in finding open-source graphics driver developers.

But since his departure from Imagination, we haven't heard anything about the "plan" they had been working on for open-source driver support. That same year as those comments, Eric Engeström began working for Imagination Technologies and was quite active in contributing to Mesa. Over the past few years he was responsible for around ~250 contributions to Mesa and one of only a few ImgTec.com contributors to Mesa -- the two others contributing patches once in a great while.

The patches were mostly just different fixes ranging from test cases to typos to other random work ranging from documentation to Mesa EGL code to RADV and Intel ANV driver fixes. What sadly didn't materialize in that time was any Mesa driver for Imagination's PowerVR graphics with those hopes from around 2015 and earlier appearing canned.

On some Mesa commits today, I noticed Eric Engeström was now committing from an Intel.com address. Sure enough, after checking on LinkedIn, Eric Engeström indeed has migrated to the Intel open-source driver team. Intel continues being one of the largest -- in fact, most likely the largest -- employer of Linux open-source graphics driver developers and more broadly Linux hardware driver / kernel contributors for that matter.