Prominent Mesa Developer Now Working For Arm On PanVK & Panfrost Code

Erik Faye-Lund who has contributed to the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack working on areas like Zink and most notably the PanVK Vulkan and Panfrost Gallium3D drivers forr Arm Mali hardware is now working directly for Arm. The Norwegian developer shared today that he recently joined Arm after eight years at Collabora. At Arm he will continue to work on the upstream PanVK Vulkan driver and Panfrost Gallium3D driver code for Mali graphics. It's exciting to hear that he will be continuing these Mesa development efforts at Arm directly. He remarked in today's blog post: "It’s been less than 1.5 months so far, and Arm has a pretty extensive onboarding process, so a lot of the details haven’t materialized yet. But it’s clear that I’ll still be working on Panfrost and PanVK. I’ll also still be serving on the X.Org BoD. ... My longer term goal is to make sure Arm is as good as we can reasonably be at working with upstream. There are certainly some challenges in this area, but I hope that I can work with the stakeholders to make sure we get there." As for deciding to leave the Collabora open-source consulting firm, he noted: "The main reason I left was that after many years of working at Collabora it had become more and more clear that the top leadership and I had some pretty fundamental disagreements on how the company should be run. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to nudge things in what I think would have been the right direction, but that didn’t lead to anything but burnout on my part. In the end, it seemed best to just part ways. But also, one thing that I always disliked while working at Collabora, was working as a contractor. It’s just a lot of paperwork and makes a lot of things that should be simple much harder. This was mostly things between me and the Norwegian government, like tax filing, sick leave and parental issues. This wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it certainly contributed." More details for those interested can be found on Erik's blog.