Linux’s Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down

Days after a DRM driver developer orphaned his drivers due to health reasons in stepping down, the sole maintainer at large of the Linux wireless (WiFi) drivers is stepping down and without any immediate replacement.

Kalle Valo who has been a Qualcomm Atheros engineer for more than the past decade and contributor to the Linux kernel since 2008 during the Linux 2.6 kernel days has decided to step down. Kalle announced this week on the Linux wireless mailing list:

“I’m stepping down from all my maintainer roles. My first commit feed9bab7b14 (“spi: omap2_mcspi PIO RX fix”) to the kernel was back in 2008 for v2.6.24 so I have been here for a long time. Thank you everyone who I have worked with, there are too many to list here.

Jeff continues to maintain ath10k, ath11k and ath12k drivers so they are unaffected. But for the wireless driver maintainer (drivers/net/wireless/) there is no replacement at the moment. If anyone is interested, please do let Johannes and me know.”

Kalle was a co-maintainer to the various Qualcomm Atheros WiFi drivers but was the sole maintainer to the wireless networking drivers at large.

Many expressed their appreciation for Kalle’s years of service to the Linux networking stack but as of writing no one has stepped up to take over the formal maintainer role. Thankfully there are other Linux WiFi driver developers out there working on the increasing number of Linux wireless drivers, just not any immediate leader yet to take on the maintainer duties.

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