Earlier This Year Dan Williams Prepared for Scenario Where Linus Torvalds Dies
He had only just started a job at NVIDIA
It is hard to know what exactly killed Dan Williams. Several of us tried hard, in vain, to find out. It's a common name, but the time is not, yet they seem to have kept quiet about the cause (and they are fully entitled to privacy). Yesterday we tried to take stock of recent events. He was 54 at the time of his death, he moved to NVIDIA (maybe in Portland, where he had worked before, maybe not) 3 months ago, his GitHub activity stopped weeks earlier (last commits on April 3rd) and prior to that he was "chair on the Technical Advisory Board (TAB)" at the Linux Foundation. Earlier this year he planned for contingencies in case Torvalds dies.
So there's nothing we know about the cause of death, except it was sudden and unexpected. He had only just started a job at NVIDIA. █
"This has also shown that other developers have access to the kernel's main development branch and can quickly take over development management if necessary. However, should these individuals not be able or willing to do so, the organizer of the last Kernel Maintainer Summit will henceforth be responsible for convening a meeting to decide on the further course of action. To this end, they will invite at least the participants of the last summit and the members of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board (TAB); however, all of them can bring others on board. The driving force behind the text with the new procedure was Dan Williams, who has been one of the central Linux developers for years and is also a member of the TAB. He had addressed the succession plan in December at the last Maintainer Summit and had since drafted the text." -January 26th, 2026