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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."
No backup?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That's all that Ballmer needs to stop Linux? Just find Torvald's SSD?
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
Linux said "So I don't want to necessarily blame the harddisk, since it's just ten
days since I upgraded the rest of my machine, after it worked years in
the previous one. That just makes me go "hmm". As far as I know, all
the fans etc were working fine, but.."
There's his problem: "after it worked years in the previous [machine]."
His SSD died a natural death of old age.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
Allow me to channel Linus Torvalds a minute:
"What do you mean there wasn't a backup disk? Fucking kill yourself with a pipe wrench. I hate you, your mother was a whore and your dad was the neighbors dog. People like you make me sick."
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?
I've owned several hundred hard drives over the last 30 years. I've never had an active hard drive drive just blank out. I have had drives that had not been powered for a couple of years refuse to ever come back. But if I did not feel the need to even power the thing on for years, you can imagine how little I cared for what was on it.
In the last four years, I've owned around 20 SSDs. I've had five failures. Every single one was the drive just instantly lost everything. Amazingly, in four of the five cases, the drive still worked fine! It had simply lost all the data on it and believed itself to be a blank drive.
That said, the speed of SSDs makes them worth the risk to me. But I take backups far more seriously than I used to. I need them far more often.
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.
That is correct. In fact he wrote the code that is the industry standard and uses it every day. How else do you think he is going to continue completion of the project on his laptop.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Now there a new meaning for Kernel Panic!
I could write something witty for my sig, but instead wrote this...
More info here: http://goran.krampe.se/2013/01/02/ssd-nightmare/
"So power cycling can apparently trigger this - and the disk for some odd reason (self protection?) decides to decapitate itself and set accessible cylinders down to 16 instead of 16384."
His SSD gave up out of shame for all the threats and abuse it had been forced to witness
blog.sam.liddicott.com
It's comments like these that make me wish Slashdot mods could go to 10 instead of 5. Nicely done.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I'm not nearly as much of a believer in RAID for the home environment. If you (accidentally) delete something on one drive it's gone from both. Better to buy two drives and do a daily rsync. That way you have a window of opportunity to recover data. Personally, I use rsync without --delete until the 2d drive starts getting full, then I use the --delete flag to clean up.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
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.
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.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
trying to desolder 100 pins spaced 0.01" apart then resoldering them, unless you have a 0.1 mill precision soldering robot it is impossible, you can't even buy wire thin enough to do it by hand.
SMT rework by hand isint rocket science, but takes more tools than the average garage has.
Desoldering you use a custom tip for that socket/package type (one tip per package & they're not cheap). It's essentially a metal ring that heats the solder on all the pins at once. In the center of the assembly is a vacuum probe. You heat all the pins, melting all the solder & hit the button on the handpiece to suction the chip up off the board. Then clean up the pads on the board. Careful with the heat because you dont want to lift pads off the board, if you do then you have to either fix them, or make a new pads. And then if you manage to trash a via (conductivity path to a different board layer), then you've got to drill out a new one and you have to use a esd safe conductive drill with a resistance cutoff. You put a clip from the drill in contact with the layer you're trying to get to, drill down and when the drill tip makes contact with that layer the drill turns off because the circuit is complete. But it still sucks and if you don't know how all the board layers are put together you may end up trashing a trace a couple layers into the board and wrecking the whole thing.
Soldering it down you do this. Align all the chip legs on the pads. Then you can either run a small bead of solder paste across all the pins or use a wave soldering tip (small cup, uses surface tension to hold the solder in place) and drag the tip over all the pins. Heat on the pin & pad draws the solder down into the joints. If you put too much solder you might have to vac it back up and redo it if you've made bridges etc. Alignment is key, and keeping the part in position is key. I used to try and avoid using glue underneath because that made it difficult to get it back off if you needed to down the road.
Doing hand rework on that kind of stuff the hardest thing for me was dealing with smt chip caps, little bastards will crack if you heat em to fast, so you have to get a temp regulated hot plate, heat em up slow, then pick and place em quick with tweezers/needlenose & solder em down quick.
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
You have a software feature in a server OS that supports certain client OSes to do backups to the server. RAID may be a software feature, but even if it's "software raid", you often have BIOS bootable raids that even work with one of the drives missing. This essentially means that you can work OS agnostic on a lower level than "I have a backup system that works". For Linux, you can have a backup system too that will restore from a LiveCD/USB stick and stores on a remote server. The same amount of time roughly will be needed to backup and restore, differential, incremental, full backups, the works. The solution you are providing is really nothing comparable to RAID. It's fundamentally different because it works on a totally different layer, doesn't prevent downtime and it's not OS agnostic. RAID should prevent downtime, making working backups should prevent data loss. Maybe WHS is the shizniz, you rock for making actual backups, but other than that, your post is totally offtopic in this context and doesn't even begin to solve a problem that Linus was facing with his desktop.
I'm not modding you down, even though I have mod-points, but I'm telling you exactly why I think you shouldn't have posted this. I hope you learned something from it and in the future will implement both backups and RAID when unscheduled downtime is important. Maybe you would even implement a system that works for all relevant OSes in the environment you have to do it for, without relying on a single vendor that offers a closed source product. It's a risk that means you'll have to support their product and licencing and other requirements until the data isn't relevant anymore, even after you have migrated to a competing product.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Modern drives for the last five years at least, have calibration factors for platter/head packs on the EEPROM on the controller board. If you swap boards, the board most likely won't be able to read the data on the disk, since it's not calibrated to the head/platter kit.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?