Stefan Mileschin

The development of the Linux kernel has been temporarily halted after Linus Torvalds's SSD on his main workstation died.

Writing in his blog, Torvalds said that changes that were supposed to go up didn't, although he had cleared a lot of them before the SSD gave up the ghost.

"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," he said.

To be fair Torvalds had done his best. He had archived emails as he merged them, but he is worried that he may not have found all the ones that never made it out.

Torvalds is waiting until today to see if he can recover the disk, he said, but currently his machine refuses to even see the boot sector on and tries to boot from the network instead.

For the next few days he will attempt to run the entire Linux kernel development on his laptop.

"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 wrote.

A broken SSD should not really halt the evolution of an operating system and the incident does highlight some of the problems Linux kernel development is having. It is a little too dependent on one person and is not exactly disaster proof.

http://news.techeye.net/software/bro...ution-of-linux