Torvalds’ Dead SSD Delays 3.12 Linux Kernel
Even the father of Linux is not immune to hardware failure
Earlier this week, development of the Linux 3.12 kernel suffered a setback after an SSD drive in the workstation of chief architect Linus Torvalds suddenly failed.
In a message entitled ‘RIP – dead harddisk’, the creator of the open source OS asked the contributors to re-send patches and pull requests that had not yet been integrated into the kernel Git repository.
Torvalds works on the kernel full-time, and retains the highest authority to decide which new code is incorporated into it.
Solid State Delay
“The timing absolutely sucks, but it looks like the SSD in my main workstation just died on me,” wrote Torvalds, just days before the end of the two-week merge window.
“I’ll try to see if I can recover the disk, but right now my machine refuses to even see the boot sector on it, and tries to boot from the network instead. So I’m not all that hopeful.”
The developer said he didn’t lose a lot of work, and asked the community to check if their requests have been posted in the current tree on git.kernel.org.
“If worst comes to worst, I’ll just do the last next days of the merge window on the laptop that I was planning on finishing it off with anyway, since I have travel coming up,” Torvalds assured his colleagues.
The Linux kernel 3.12 is still in early stages of development, and due to go through proper testing. Some of the changes include improved power management, new KVM virtualisation features, better sound drivers, new features for EXT4 file-system and F2FS file-system.
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