AMD's Longtime Open-Source Linux Graphics Driver Advocate Retires

After working at ATI/AMD for more than a quarter century and being the open-source graphics driver manager during the early days, John Bridgman has retired.

John Bridgman served as the initial manager of the AMD Radeon open-source graphics driver project during the start of the initiative going back to 2007. It's been a wild ride since... From the days of fglrx, the xf86-video-avivo effort that preceded the official AMD open-source driver project during the R500 days, the short-lived xf86-video-radeonhd effort via the joint effort with SUSE, and so much more since then... The open-source AMD graphics driver journey has been a heck of a ride over the past decade and a half and remains going strong. In more recent years it's been even better with seeing pre-launch open-source graphics driver support in the upstream kernel and Mesa and it's been continuing that way since with Linux all the more important these days.

John Bridgman back at FOSDEM 2008 presenting on AMD's early open-source graphics driver plans.

In 2011~2012 he moved on from his formal open-source GPU driver manager role to begin tackling AMD HSA Linux support that he went on to do for several years.

Bridgman spent a few years working on AMD's HSA Linux efforts.

Since 2015 he's been an AMD Linux NPI SW Architect working on next-gen GPU enablement and related activities. Now to much surprise at the end of March he is officially retired after 26 years with ATI/AMD.

Phoronix Forums members are likely well aware of him from his interactions over the years where at least for some time at the company interacting with the Linux community via the Phoronix Forums were among his job responsibilities. He's at 13,115 posts on the Phoronix Forums as of writing. He's the third most prolific commenter in the forums.

Cheers to John Bridgman's retirement and the many years he has been advocating for open-source/Linux software at AMD.

Congratulations to Bridgman on the well-deserved retirement and thanks to his efforts of helping advocate for open-source Linux driver support over the years.