Linus Torvalds’s faulty RAM slows kernel development (UPDATED)
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."
UPDATE
Microsoft booster Liam Tung joins another Linux basher and makes misleading headlines, clickbait against Linux
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Even Linus Torvalds sometimes has PC problems | ZDNET
For most people, hardware problems and slow deliveries 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 lots of other people too.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds told a kernel contributor on Sunday that he's doing merges "very slowly" from one of his laptops as he waits for "new ECC memory DIMMS to arrive".