Intel Has A Ton Of Developers Working On Their Linux Graphics Stack

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 9 July 2015 at 12:17 PM EDT. 30 Comments
INTEL
Back in 2013 we heard Intel had 20~30 full-time developers on their Linux graphics driver team. Since then, they've only been hiring more developers. Based on email activity at least, here's a new number.

In 2013 we also heard the Intel Mesa team grew 10x in three years. They haven't stopped hiring but generally every few months hear about more hires for this group within the Intel Open-Source Technology Center. In recent months they hired a Nouveau driver developer as well as a former Ubuntu developer.


The actual employee counts within groups at Intel -- and most other large companies -- tend to be sort of considered a trade secret. However, out of curiosity, I've been trying to find some updated numbers. Today I decided to write up a little script to scan the mailing list archives in trying to find the total number of active Intel employees on the mailing lists. Of course, it isn't perfect as some Intel developers do largely communicate from their personal email addresses, some of the Intel.com participants are just QA or from other groups, but regardless should put Intel's open-source Linux contributions in better perspective.

What I found when scanning this month's intel-gfx mailing list (the list centered around the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver) there were 31 different email addresses from intel.com shooting out emails and another 12 from linux.intel.com firing off emails. So that would put over 40 Intel employees sending out emails just in the past nine days to this Linux graphics mailing list.

In collecting the archives for the past six months, there have been 98 different Intel.com email addresses active on the mailing list and 23 for linux.Intel.com! Just to reiterate though, some of those Intel people are part of QA teams, getting questions answered, and other parts of the company.


Next up I ran the script across the dri-devel mailing list for a more generic look at the Linux graphics stack. Over the past six months, there were 27 different Intel.com email addresses and 15 different linux.Intel.com email addresses... So 42 Intel folks partaking in DRI mailing list discussions.

Lastly, on the Mesa mailing list (Mesa-dev) over the past six months there have been emails from 26 Intel.com email addresses and six linux.intel.com emails.

Two years ago their count was 20~30 Intel Linux graphics developers but based on the mailing list activity, recent hires, and other factors, it looks like the number of actual developers is somewhere probably around 30~50 at this point. Of course, as shown by the intel-gfx results, there are a lot of other Intel employees engaging publicly over their open-source driver whether it be for QA, support, etc.

Pretty much however you interpret these numbers it equates to a lot of Intel Linux activity and developers involved...Coming up in another Phoronix article shortly will be looking at how these numbers compare to that of other companies engaging over open-source Linux graphics, which shouldn't be a big surprise to most Phoronix readers.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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