Stefan Mileschin

Chipmaker AMD has decided that the best way to save money is to stop investing in open source developers.

According to H Online, AMD has closed the Dresden, Germany-based Operating System Research Center (OSRC) and dismissed the centre's employees.

OSRC staff developed Linux support for AMD's server processors, but they also wrote code and extensions for related desktop and notebook CPUs. One of their projects was to support CPU frequency scaling for the PowerNow and Turbo Core technologies.

One of AMD's former team helped develop the "IOMMU groups" feature that was integrated into Linux 3.6. This natty code created a new Linux 3.6 technology that allows a host's PCIe devices to be passed through to virtual machines and can also be used with Intel CPUs.

It looks like the firings will mean that AMD will lose almost all developers who have recently submitted major changes to support new processors and chip sets in Linux. OSRC developers also worked on open source virtualisation systems such as the Xen hypervisor.

While this would appear to be a total culling of staff on open source projects, it seems staff working on open source drivers for the graphics cores on graphics cards and AMD's Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) have not affected. This is only four developers who work on the open source graphics drivers that are part of the Linux kernel, Mesa 3D and X.org.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/amd-cl...n-sauce-bottle