Did the Linux memory management maintainer "just quit"?
3 comments
David Hildenbrand, another very involved memory management legend is picking up the role. It will be fine.
It's not surprising to see that he wants to retire. Andrew Morton is an absolute legend and deserves it. His work will be felt for a very long time, and his transition plan is also highly professional. All the best to him.
What more do you need to know? The authoritative sources (I think lwn.net is, but I'm sure there's a ton of 'well, ackshually...' opinions) say he's unwinding his role, and that new people are picking it up. Seems pretty non-alarmist, non-brethless when you get out of the douchebag-sphere are do the basic research. But I guess you don't get clicks for "there's a change, it's being handled by adults, nothing to worry about".
Title: "Linux Memory Had One Maintainer for 26 Years. He Just Quit. Now What?"
Subtitle: "One person held the code that runs every Android phone, cloud server, and supercomputer for 26 years. On April 21, he posted one message and then was silent."
Last non-paywalled sentence: "Two weeks later, at a developer summit in Zagreb, the memory management team tried to figure out how to replace him. They couldn’t."
This sounded very alarmist so I did a quick search (note: I'm not a Linux kernel expert or enthusiast by any measure). What I found seemed fairly tame:
Andrew Mortan's transition announcement: https://lwn.net/ml/all/[email protected]/
May 7 announcement of new maintainer: https://lwn.net/Articles/1070994/
Can someone familiar with the matter confirm that I was right to dismiss the original article as alarmist engagement bait, or is there reason for worry?