Hardware Vendor Hate List

• Logitech. You helpfully claim to be able to provide replacement feet for keyboards free of charge — presumably, breakages are not exactly uncommon. Then you claim not to keep track of whether or not you have any spares for my year-old G15 keyboard, so you can’t give me any. And no, you won’t go and have a look to find out whether you do have any.
• Whoever makes the push pins found on LGA 775 CPUs. Especially the kind that require so much force to lock that it’s a race between the motherboard and my finger to see which will break first.
• Abit. You should be ashamed of the F-I90HD motherboard for all sorts of reasons, but today’s gripe is about the heatsink on the integrated graphics chip. I shouldn’t have to install a cooling fan onto the heatsink to stop the screen from going black when the CPU is under load.

Yay for git

Linux 2.6.26-rc2 wouldn’t boot on my desktop. Linux 2.6.25 worked. In the good old days, tracking down why would be a major pain in the ass. But now, a quick git bisect and fifteen reboots later, I have the exact commit: 3def3d6ddf43dbe20c00c3cbc38dfacc8586998f, also known as:

Author: Yinghai Lu
Date:   Fri Feb 22 17:07:16 2008 -0800

    x86: clean up e820_reserve_resources on 64-bit

    e820_resource_resources could use insert_resource instead of request_resource
    also move code_resource, data_resource, bss_resource, and crashk_res
    out of e820_reserve_resources.

    Signed-off-by: Yinghai Lu
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

Verifying that this really is the offender is equally easy — a quick ‘git revert’ on head and another reboot and the kernel’s working again. Now, I know nothing about what an e820 is beyond what Google tells me, but hopefully someone else will.

As much as I hate to say it, if this were Subversion I’d still be tracking down the bug. And if it were CVS, I wouldn’t've bothered.