David Hildenbrand, a highly influential Linux kernel engineer, has announced his departure from Red Hat after a decade of contributing to critical areas of the Linux operating system. His recent update to his kernel patch maintainer information on kernel.org signals his departure from the company, though he has not yet disclosed his new role or destination. Hildenbrand’s work over the past ten years has significantly shaped memory management, virtual,ization technologies, and the VirtIO framework, which are fundamental to Red Hat’s cloud and virtualization strategies.
Throughout his tenure at Red Hat, Hildenbrand was involved in several critical Linux kernel projects, including the HugeTLB code, s390 KVM code, memory management reclaim code, and upstream maintenance of core memory management features. He was also a reviewer for the Get User Pages (GUP) memory management code, kernel samepage merging (KSM), reverse mapping (RMAP), transparent hugepage (THP), memory advice (MADVISE), VirtIO memory driver, and VirtIO balloon driver. His expertise helped maintain and improve the performance of Linux systems in both enterprise and cloud environments.
Hildenbrand had been based in Munich for the past ten years, primarily working on QEMU/KVM virtualization and Linux kernel memory management. In 2025 alone, he has authored or been involved with over a thousand mainline Linux kernel patches, highlighting his extensive contributions to the open-source community. His departure is expected to have a noticeable impact on Red Hat’s development team, particularly in the areas of kernel optimization and virtualization technologies. Red Hat has not yet commented on the matter, but the loss of such a key developer is a significant event for the open-source community.