Intel's Open-Source Graphics Team Poaches A Top Nouveau Driver Developer

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 21 January 2015 at 05:56 AM EST. 26 Comments
NVIDIA
While writing yesterday's article about Keith Packard leaving Intel's open-source Linux graphics team after being a longtime member of the X community, I noticed that Intel has a rather interesting new hire... A prominent member of Nouveau, the community-based, open-source NVIDIA driver project.

Martin Peres is now one of the newest members of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center, working to improve the open-source Linux graphics support. On Monday there was a trivial Mesa commit but what was interesting is that it marked Martin Peres' new email address as coming from "linux.intel.com." After checking, on the X.Org BoD page it also now lists Martin's affiliate as Intel. I've also confirmed Martin working for Intel through a source at XDC2014 last year in France where he originally heard this information, which was organized by Martin. (To be clear, Martin isn't replacing Keith, the timing is just a coincidence.)


Martin Peres has been a longtime contributor to the Nouveau driver project. Martin is responsible for numerous accomplishments now within the Nouveau project including a lot of work on fan management, power management, driver security, and numerous other items. Going back almost five years was when he began tackling power management for Nouveau. During his time contributing to Nouveau, Martin has been a university student in France.

It's not yet known whether Martin joining Intel will forbid him from contributing at all to the open-source Nouveau project going forward, but hopefully not. There's a fairly good track record now of open-source graphics developers getting their start in Nouveau and since moving on: among them is Nouveau's original developer Stéphane Marchesin who now works for Google on the Chrome OS team, Ben Skeggs who now works for Red Hat and still serves as the Nouveau DRM maintainer, and now Martin. On the open-source mobile/Tegra front, Thierry Reding began working on open-source Tegra code while working for Avionic Design GmbH before being recruited by NVIDIA.
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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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