Did the Linux memory management maintainer "just quit"?

17 points

12 days ago

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/[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?

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