A glitch in the 3.12 merge window [LWN.net]

From:		Linus Torvalds <torvalds-AT-linux-foundation.org>
To:		Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel-AT-vger.kernel.org>
Subject:		RIP - dead harddisk..
Date:		Tue, 10 Sep 2013 19:26:10 -0700
Message-ID:		<CA+55aFyTpb8k523=qqeO9LMvs6EgmaRdohip0FcTX7Qip1VyxA@mail.gmail.com>
Cc:		Peter Anvin <hpa-AT-linux.intel.com>, Guenter Roeck <linux-AT-roeck-us.net>, Dave Airlie <airlied-AT-linux.ie>, Bruce Fields <bfields-AT-fieldses.org>
Archive-link:		Article, Thread

The timing absolutely sucks, but it looks like the SSD in my main
workstation just died on me.

I had pushed out _most_ of my pulls today, so realistically I didn't
lose a lot of work. However, any people having outstanding pull
requests or patches that they expected me to merge that are not in the
current tree on git.kernel.org, you may want to re-send the email,
because I had archived emails as I merged them, and I may not have
found all the ones that never made it out.. I know a few involved,
but....

That said, wait until tomorrow. 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.

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. At least this didn't happen at
the very beginning of the merge window...

                   Linus
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A glitch in the 3.12 merge window

Posted Sep 11, 2013 3:24 UTC (Wed) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link]

so a sloppy NSA back-end killed his computer?

A glitch in the 3.12 merge window

Posted Sep 11, 2013 6:49 UTC (Wed) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link]

Would a RAID of SSDs (or SSD/HDD) have helped?

A glitch in the 3.12 merge window

Posted Sep 11, 2013 7:22 UTC (Wed) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link]

I think Linus uses a MacbookAir and Pixel so no RAID.

A glitch in the 3.12 merge window

Posted Sep 11, 2013 7:24 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

It was asked, and Linus responded that he doesn't bother with backups as such on his machines. He keeps all the important things on multiple machines (plus critical things like SSH keys on offline media)

The problem here isn't really the loss of the disk, it's the timing of it (just as he's about to travel) and the fact that there may be some merge requests that people will have to re-send

A glitch in the 3.12 merge window

Posted Sep 11, 2013 6:52 UTC (Wed) by adamg (subscriber, #42260) [Link]

Only wimps use tape backup: real men just push their important stuff to remote git tree, and let the rest of the world clone it ;)

A glitch in the 3.12 merge window

Posted Sep 11, 2013 8:31 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]

Linus is probably a very good stress-tester for any SSD! :-)

A glitch in the 3.12 merge window

Posted Sep 11, 2013 12:44 UTC (Wed) by gringer (guest, #63171) [Link]

Strange, I had a similar problem with my sid/jessie work computer on Monday/Tuesday this week (Kingston SSDnow + WD 3TB spinning disk). The computer died somehow (powercut, ?, haven't looked at the logs yet...). I came in to work on Tuesday to discover that it tried to reboot, and grub came back with a message something like 'ELF header size too small'. I could only use a few modules, and those didn't include file system ones.

I needed to re-install grub on the boot sector (using another computer), then had a long wait for the XFS partition on the other drive to mount (presumably due to unfinished writes). After another full upgrade, I reinstalled grub again using the work computer and things seem to (so far) be working fine.

I've got somewhat used to this happening with sid upgrades. About once every couple of years something happens that needs a rescue CD -- this was one of those times.