Many Debian/Ubuntu Packages for Intel Accelerators and More Have Been Orphaned (www.phoronix.com)

Around a dozen Intel-related Debian packages were recently marked as orphaned—left unmaintained after their Intel maintainers departed and no new Debian Developers/Maintainers have stepped up. The affected packages include accel-config (user-space setup for Intel Data Streaming Accelerators on modern Xeon CPUs), QAT stack pieces (qatlib, qatengine, qatzip), intel-cmt-cat (cache monitoring/allocation and memory bandwidth tracking), intel-lpmd (low-power daemon), ipp-crypto and intel-ipsec-mb (crypto primitives and multi-buffer IPSec), plus utilities like numatop, psst, thermald and thunderbolt-tools. These user-space components are critical for configuring, debugging and accelerating hardware features that many performance-sensitive workloads rely on. For the AI/ML community this matters because QAT, DSA and related libraries can offload cryptographic, compression and data-movement tasks that affect throughput and latency in inference and data pipelines; unmanaged packages also raise security, compatibility and deployment burdens for Debian/Ubuntu users. If maintainership isn’t picked up, downstream distros may ship outdated or broken integrations, forcing teams to compile from source or rely on unofficial binaries—adding friction to reproducible ML environments. The orphaning follows other recent Intel open-source withdrawals and kernel driver abandonments, underscoring a potential gap in vendor-maintained Linux packaging that the community or other organizations will need to fill.