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Did the Linux memory management maintainer "just quit"?

7 points

7 hours ago

| 3 comments

I came across this breathlessly written article, the beginning of which I will reproduce below, so as to not give its author any more engagement:

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/20260421094216.8dfe14a8c62f2420fa5aace1@linux-foundation.org/

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?

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afr0ck

23 minutes ago

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David Hildenbrand, another very involved memory management legend is picking up the role. It will be fine.

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throwaway54616

1 hour ago

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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.

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kjs3

54 minutes ago

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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".