Even Linus Torvalds Sometimes Has PC Problems
upstart writes:
For most people, hardware problems and slow deliveries are annoying. But if you're the person behind the operating system that underpins much of the cloud, Android and IoT, your problems could easily become a big issue 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".
[...] "It was literally a DIMM going bad in my machine randomly after 2.5 years of it being perfectly stable. Go figure. Verified first by booting an old kernel, and then with memtest86+ overnight," he explains in a Linux kernel developer mailing list spotted by The Register.
[...] In early 2020, during the first wave of pandemic restrictions, Torvalds switched his main 'frankenbox' PC from one with an i9-9900k to one equipped with a monster 32-core AMD Threadripper 3970x-based processor. It was, as he said then, the first time in 15 years that his desktop wasn't Intel-based. As a consequence of moving off Intel, his 'allmodconfig' test builds accelerated by a factor of three.
[...] Torvalds last year took a swipe at Intel for its ECC memory policies. "Intel has been detrimental to the whole industry and to users because of their bad and misguided policies wrt [with regards to] ECC. Seriously," he wrote.
Torvalds has also been using an Apple M1 silicon laptop for some development work, thanks to the Asahi Linux project, which has been working on bringnig the Arch Linux distro to Apple's M1 architecture.
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