FreeDesktop.org GitLab crippled by hard drive failure, development of dozens of open source projects halted

Intensive development around Mesa, the X.Org server, and dozens of other open-source projects stalled this weekend after FreeDesktop.org’s GitLab crashed, bringing down the entire service. FreeDesktop.org’s GitLab hosts Mesa, X.Org, Wayland, and many other open-source code repositories such as LibreOffice and GStreamer.

In addition, it hosts the personal development repositories of many of the developers involved in these projects and coordinates upstream development through GitLab’s merge requests, CI, and related capabilities.

At press time, FreeDesktop.org’s GitLab has been down for the past 12 hours, with no notice of return to normal. The root domain URL for FreeDesktop.org was also compromised at one point, as the two solid-state drives that powered it was also broken.

The administrators at FreeDesktop.org have been working hard for the past few hours to restore the hard drive RAID, but so far with no results.

Live status on this critical outage and recovery can be found on the #freedesktop IRC channel:

They are working hard to bring the service back and hope to restore the contents of all failed disks. Due to the decentralized nature of Git and the mirroring of many of these repositories on GitLab, there shouldn’t be significant data loss in the end, but then there’s the tricky GitLab mass queue of merge requests and other pending data and configuration issues that need to be solved.

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