Linux 6.8 Merge Window On Hiatus Due To Winter Storm

Linus Torvalds just announced he's had to put the Linux 6.8 merge window on hold due to a brutal winter storm knocking the Pacific Northwest.

Torvalds has found himself without Internet or electricity due to a powerful winter storm outside of Portland, Oregon where he resides. This comes in the middle of the Linux 6.8 merge window with many pull requests remaining and further material expected in the week ahead. He's announced this winter storm issue as last time he was in a similar issue he ended up being a week without power and Internet.

Catching my immediate attention a few minutes ago was a message entitled "Heads up - effectively offline for now" hitting the Linux kernel mailing list. Torvalds explained:

Just a note to say that the merge window is paused as far as I'm concerned, because we've lost power and internet thanks to a winter storm. Of course, this is Oregon, so "storm" here is what some people would probably consider "somewhat windy", and "winter" here means that the temperature is approaching -10°C.

There's apparently about 100k people without power, and I doubt our neighborhood is the priority, so I expect to be without power for some time still. I hope I'm wrong, but a few years ago it took more than a week to restore power due to all the downed trees. It's hopefully nowhere near that, but..

And before anybody says "just go to a Starbucks and work from there", the scariest thing out there - apart from possibly downed trees and power lines - is other drivers. I'll stay put.

So the Linux 6.8 merge window in turn is impacted, we'll see if he ends up extending the merge window / Linux 6.8-rc1 date past next Sunday (21 January) or if his outage only lasts a short time and he's able to catch up in time.

In addition to the winter storm challenges, Torvalds' main production system is also currently affected by a severe performance regression that even with the problematic commit being known is proving tricky and difficult to sort out. So it's been quite a week for Linus.

It's a bit surprising though given Torvalds' location he doesn't have any power back-up solution and/or Starlink for backup Internet. Even in my setting, Starlink continues to work out great as a backup Internet connection in times of all too frequent Comcast outages.