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Grandpa's computer breaks, the developed world shudders the consiquences

https://archive.ph/WhvWh

If the next version of the Linux kernel emerges a little slower than usual, blame a dodgy DIMM in Linus Torvalds's AMD Threadripper-powered PC and the vagaries of the memory market.

In a post responding to a kernel developer inquiring if he had missed a Git Pull, Torvalds on Sunday revealed the request was still in his queue as "I'm doing merges (very slowly) on my laptop, while waiting for new ECC memory DIMMs to arrive."

Torvalds needs the DIMMs because over the last few days he experienced what he described as "some instability on my main desktop the … with random memory corruption in user space resulting in my allmodconfig builds randomly failing with internal compiler errors etc."

The Linux boss's first thought was that a new kernel bug had caused the problem – which isn't good but sometimes happens.

His instinct was wrong.

"It was literally a DIMM going bad in my machine randomly after 2.5 years of it being perfectly stable," he wrote. "Go figure. Verified first by booting an old kernel, and then with memtest86+ overnight."

Torvalds appears to have been tracking delivery of the new DIMMs as he reported replacement memory was "out for delivery" and predicted it should arrive later on Sunday evening.

"I'll probably leave memtest86+ for another overnight with the new DIMMs just because this wasn't the greatest experience ever. A fair amount of wasted time blaming all the wrong things, because obviously it wasn't my hardware suddenly going bad," he added.

Torvalds's post is interesting for two other reasons. One is that the laptop he mentions could be the recent MacBook – complete with Arm64 Apple silicon – that he used to push the final cut of Linux 5.19. If that's the same laptop he used on Sunday, said silicon may not be quite up to one of the more high-profile workloads in the world – or perhaps Linus just misses the comforts of a big screen.

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