When a kernel developer asked Linus Torvalds if he’d missed a Git pull, Torvalds “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,'” reports The Register:
Torvalds needs the DIMMs because over the last few days he experienced what he described as “some instability on my main desktop… 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.”
Torvalds appears to have been tracking