Eric Anholt Leaves Intel's Linux Graphics Team For Broadcom

Eric Anholt, one of the most prolific contributors to Intel's Mesa graphics driver stack in past years, has departed Intel to instead work for Broadcom.

Eric has been responsible for large parts of Intel's Mesa support along with working on the X.Org Server and related components like GLAMOR while being employed by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center. Interestingly, he has left Intel to work for Broadcom -- a company that up until recently hasn't been very open-source friendly.

Eric Anholt wrote in a new blog post, "I've taken on a new role as an open source developer there. I'm going to be working on building an MIT-licensed Mesa and kernel DRM driver for the 2708 (aka the 2835), the chip that's in the Raspberry Pi."

This is really great news for Raspberry Pi fans that there's a full-time, experienced Linux graphics driver developer that will now be working on a proper DRM/KMS driver and Mesa driver. It was back in February that Broadcom open-sourced their graphics driver stack that is now of more promising quality than their earlier code drops. Eric says though it will be a long process getting the Mesa and DRM code into shape for Broadcom. "I'm still working on getting a useful development environment set up and building my first bits of stub DRM code. There are a lot of open questions still as to how we'll manage the transition from having most of the graphics hardware communication managed by the VPU to having it run on the ARM (since the VPU code is a firmware blob currently, we have to be careful to figure out when it will stomp on various bits of hardware as I incrementally take over things that used to be its job). I'll have repos up as soon as I have some code that does anything."