David Hildenbrand, a prominent Linux kernel engineer with a decade of experience at Red Hat, is leaving the company after significant contributions to memory management, virtualization, and VirtIO. His departure is marked by updating his maintainer info to kernel.org, indicating his move away from Red Hat.
Hildenbrand had been employed by Red Hat for the past decade in Munich, working on QEMU/KVM virtualization, Linux kernel memory management, VirtIO, and related low-level areas. His work has been instrumental in key Linux kernel subsystems such as HugeTLB code, s390 KVM code, and memory management reclaim code. He also serves as an upstream maintainer for core memory management code, Get User Pages (GUP) memory management code, kernel samepage merging (KSM), reverse mapping (RMAP), transparent hugepage (THP), memory advice (MADVIS), VirtIO memory driver, and VirtIO balloon driver.
Just this year alone, so far in 2025, Hildenbrand has authored or been mentioned on more than one thousand mainline Linux kernel patches. His expertise has been a cornerstone in Red Hat’s open-source contributions and technical advancements. As he prepares to move on, the Linux community and Red Hat are likely to reflect on his impactful work and the potential implications of his departure on ongoing projects and future developments in the Linux kernel.