For most people, hardware problems and slow delivery annoy them. But if you’re the person behind the operating system that underpins much of the cloud, Android, and IoT, your problem could easily become a problem for many others, too.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds told a kernel collaborator on Sunday that he was merging “very slowly” from one of his laptops as he waited for “new ECC DIMMS memory to arrive” .
ECC refers to “Error Correcting Code” memory designed to prevent certain types of attacks.
As for Torvalds’ current obstacles to code merging for the Linux kernel version 6.1, a kernel bug – which is the usual suspect – is not the cause.
“It’s actually a DIMM that randomly failed in my machine after 2.5 years since it was completely stable. Let’s see. First verify by booting a kernel. old, then with memtest86+ overnight”. he explains on the Linux kernel developer mailing list spot by The Register.
“My new storage is “pending delivery”, so hopefully I’ll be backing up at full speed tonight, but I’ll probably leave memtest86+ for another night with a new DIMM since it’s not a the best experience ever. A huge amount of time wasted blaming all the things that went wrong, because _obviously_ it wasn’t my hardware that suddenly crashed,” he said. write.
In early 2020, during the first wave of pandemic restrictions, Torvalds switched his main ‘Frankenbox’ PC from a i9-9900k to one equipped with a monster 32-core AMD Threadripper 3970x-based processor. That is, as he said at the time, for the first time in 15 years his desktop is not based on Intel. As a result of leaving Intel, his ‘allmodconfig’ test builds were sped up by a factor of three.
Torvalds explains that his system is “all set up for ECC,” except that he built it during the early COVID-19 restrictions when “there wasn’t any ECC memory at any point.” What a fair price.”
“And then I never fixed it, until I had to find the fault the hard way. I really *hate* the crazy industry politics and bad vendors that made ECC memory so bad. ” special “https://www.zdnet.com/article/Even-linus-torvalds-times-has-pc-problem/.”
Torvalds last year concerned Intel about its ECC memory policies. “Intel has been detrimental to the industry as a whole and to users because of their erroneous and bad policies. [with regards to] ECC. Seriously,” he wrote.
Torvalds also have am using Apple M1 silicon silicon laptop for some development work thanks to Asahi Linux project, already working bringing the Arch Linux distribution to Apple’s M1 architecture.
