SSD Failure Temporarily Halts Linux 3.12 Kernel Work

jones_supa writes "The sudden death of a solid-state drive in Linus Torvalds' main workstation has led to the work on the 3.12 Linux kernel being temporarily suspended. Torvalds has not been able to recover anything from the drive. Subsystem maintainers who have outstanding pull requests may need to re-submit their requests in the coming days. If the SSD isn't recoverable he will finish out the Linux 3.12 merge window from a laptop."

Really?

[koan]

No backup?

Re:Really?

[gagol]

I found spinning rust to at least give some clues prior to a crash and burn. I would say, single ssd is not ready for anything critical, in my opinion. Worst case scenario, you can always get the platters transfered in a good drive and recover from there (pricey, bur cheap if data is valuable enough).

Re:Eggs, Basket

[CastrTroy]

Makes me wonder what would happen to Linux development if Torvalds was to get hit by a bus, or be incapacitated in some way. Is kernel development that reliant on one person that a single laptop breaking brings everything to a halt?

why this news?

[Laxori666]

Why is this news... is this our version of People magazine, where instead of hearing about all the details of the Kardashians' lives, we hear about every email or event that happens to Linus?

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to think that too, until I had a mechanical hard drive experience controller failure without warning. Single drive is not ready for anything critical, regardless of the storage mechanism.

Re:Someone flame him...

[sjames]

He has backups all over the world. But like with any backup, you can't actually restore from it until you replace the failed disk.

Re:Next project - backups!

[PRMan]

It's comments like these that make me wish Slashdot mods could go to 10 instead of 5. Nicely done.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Only wimps use tape backup. Real deities just upload their important stuff on FTP and let the rest of the universe mirror it.

Good ol' Linus and his aversion to backups

[Anonymous Coward]

According to a speech of his, that's how Linux got started. He accidentally wiped his MINIX partition.

Re:You trust Torvalds after this?

[hawguy]

As someone who's taken over server administration from very talented developers a number of times, I've found that being a great developer doesn't mean that you're a great sysadmin. Developers may understand conceptually that RAID and backups are important (but sometimes think that RAID is a backup), but that doesn't mean that they actually set them up.

And as a sysadmin, I'm tired of hearing that. RAID1,5,6,10,Z is a backup. It's not an archive. An archive is what you go to when you want the old version. A backup is generally one of two things:
1) Something that lets you keep chugging through a failure (raid5, a backup generator with automatic cut-over, etc)
2) A standby spare (tape, NAS/usb drive, secondary location with desks/computers/etc.

RAID (other than 0) is absolutely a backup. It's not the perfect backup but it is a backup. What it is NOT is an archive - last night's/week's/month's/quarter's data.

No, RAID is *not* a backup, RAID's only purpose is to improve reliability/uptime by letting you ride through hardware failures, but it does nothing to protect you from all of the rest of the things that can destroy your data, like file corruption, fat fingering a "rm -rf / home/someuser", a virus, a website hack attack, etc. That's what your backups are for, but you can call them archives if you like, but don't call RAID a "backup" because it's not. Depending on what the problem is and when you discover it, you may need to go back through several archives before you find the data you're looking for.

Re:None of that mattered, because

[Zero__Kelvin]

". Now people have to redo a lot of effort, because he was too lazy or arrogant to install one of the many effortless backup systems available."

That is a ridiculous statement. Work is lost every time a drive fails unless it happens to fail immediately after a backup. Full backups take lots of time. If you understood git better you would realize that a lot less work is lost the git way than with old school backups. I'm sure that every time Linus does a successful merge he pushes it to a git repo elsewhere. All history is in the git logs. I am certain the work he lost is minimal, and is much less than if he was relying on nightly backups and the failure happened near the end of the work day. Just the effort of trying to determine what was done and what has been lost would be far more time consuming without git.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft also sure as hell wouldn't have a single hard drive failure interrupt their patch submission process (yes, it is internal but they have a tree of lab builds, team builds, and "winmain" with a well defined RI - reverse integration process for moving patches in) and their build process. Actually - I don't think anyone would allow a single drive failure to do this. It seems, well, stupid. What was Linus smoking?

Re:RAID

[GigaplexNZ]

That's just asinine. You should never rely on recovery of data from a broken drive to avoid data loss. Even if you do recover data from a broken HDD you shouldn't trust it hasn't had some form of corruption. Always have a backup. If you have backups, who cares if the drive is recoverable?

Also, don't buy Sandforce SSDs. There are plenty of alternatives that are faster and more reliable.

Re:RAID

[drinkypoo]

You're right in that you should never rely blah blah blah, but he's right in that you should be able to attempt recovery. And he's more right, because he never said you shouldn't make backups.

Re:RAID

[bemymonkey]

So... stay the fuck away from Sandforce controllers? This has been common knowledge for years...