David Hildenbrand, a prominent Linux kernel engineer with a decade of contributions to memory management and virtualization at Red Hat, is leaving the company. His departure is marked by recent changes to his kernel patch maintainer information, though he has not yet revealed his next destination.
Hildenbrand had been employed by Red Hat the past decade in Munich working on QEMU/KVM virtualization, Linux kernel memory management, VirtIO, and related low-level areas. Just this year alone so far in 2025 he’s authored or been mentioned on more than one thousand mainline Linux kernel patches.
Phoronix reports that Hildenbrand serves as a reviewer for the HugeTLB code, s390 KVM code, and memory management reclaim code. He also serves as an upstream maintainer for the Linux kernel’s core memory management code, 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.
The tech community will now await his next move, which could influence the direction of open-source development. While Hildenbrand has not disclosed his future plans, his departure marks a notable shift for Red Hat’s open-source initiatives.