One thing that was sneaky was that how the rust coreutils are laid out invalidated a bunch of AppArmor.
Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
311–320 of 341 posts
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's GPL free. which is good for embedded, the business side of it. like cars.
Good for car manufacturers , not necessarily for cars or their owners. As a car owner I quite like manufacturers to be forced to produce source code.
yes, exactly, that's the fliplside of it. the business loves GPL free embedded, gpl-3 was created to protect our freedom, the right to repair and modify, as far as GPL components are concerned. it was created as response to Tivo, who locked in their embedded system (a TV iirc).
the trend to give software mit or bsd licenses instead ead of GPL is concerning.
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#313Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#314I wonder about the dependency graphs of all these replacement utilities.
The vast majority of Rust projects I've seen pull in hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of external projects. If Ubuntu's rusty tools do the same, any memory safety gained would come with a greatly increased supply chain risk.
Doesn't attack surface matter?
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither. They basically see Rust as the future. They want to be able to attract young contributors and to hire young employees who are excited about Rust and who want the safety features. Bear in mind, the average age of the Linux developer is increasing. They also see technical benefits in Rust. And they are increasing test coverage of both the Rust tools and the tools written in C, IIRC. My source is this interview…
In reality, I think it much more about taking more control over parts of the ecosystem - the license change is part of it, but also getting rid of the old stubborn communities and maintainers.
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Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they followed the license nothing. My uninformed knowledge is that the rust based rewrite is MIT, the originals are GPL, and you can't include GPL code in a MIT licensed project without making it GPL.
But you should be able to use a GPL test suite on an MIT-licensed program (or even a proprietary one, without the program needing to be under the GPL.
Ehh... Technically yes but when you don't own the copyright on the tests you need to be very careful against creating derivative works, and you need to preserve both licenses in the distributed source.
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#317I really don't understand why Canonical rushes this. If 'rm' can't remove all possible directory entries, that is a big issue: $ podman run --rm -it ubuntu:26.10 $ apt update -y; apt upgrade -y $ rm --version rm (uutils coreutils) 0.10.0 $ gnumkdir -p $(yes a/ | head -n $((32 * 1024)) | tr -d '\n') $ rm -rf a Segmentation fault (core dumped) rm -rf a $ ls a a $ gnurm -rf a $ ls a ls: cannot access 'a': No such file o…
Their strategy is basically adopt now, hey now we’re forced to fix it! And it’s disgusting. Frankly, I don’t know how any enterprise users on Ubuntu will be able to forgive this. Well, many businesses are on RHEL and not Ubuntu anyways…
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#318I really don't understand why Canonical rushes this. If 'rm' can't remove all possible directory entries, that is a big issue: $ podman run --rm -it ubuntu:26.10 $ apt update -y; apt upgrade -y $ rm --version rm (uutils coreutils) 0.10.0 $ gnumkdir -p $(yes a/ | head -n $((32 * 1024)) | tr -d '\n') $ rm -rf a Segmentation fault (core dumped) rm -rf a $ ls a a $ gnurm -rf a $ ls a ls: cannot access 'a': No such file o…
It can fail blazingly fast!
Am I the only one cynical enough to feel physical pain when I see “blazing fast” in a README? It’s like a dog whistle for “hey everybody, I’m kinda annoying!”
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#319I really don't understand why Canonical rushes this. If 'rm' can't remove all possible directory entries, that is a big issue: $ podman run --rm -it ubuntu:26.10 $ apt update -y; apt upgrade -y $ rm --version rm (uutils coreutils) 0.10.0 $ gnumkdir -p $(yes a/ | head -n $((32 * 1024)) | tr -d '\n') $ rm -rf a Segmentation fault (core dumped) rm -rf a $ ls a a $ gnurm -rf a $ ls a ls: cannot access 'a': No such file o…
Rush? This is an interim release (95% or so only tracks LTS's) that is not even out yet... Go file a bug reports if you have some time.
The 26.04.01 upgrade LTS is delayed from it too, not just interim releases.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2026-Augus...
> Users of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will be offered an automatic upgrade to 26.04.1 LTS via Update Manager a couple of weeks following this release after some planned backports to address regressions in a recent version of rust-coreutils.
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#320Beware that rust coreutils on 26.04 currently has really bad performance with larger block sizes. Ganeti uses "dd bs=1M" as part of a disc image transfer pipeline, and with 26.04 performance dropped from ~350MB/sec to 30MB/sec, with the dd command CPU-bounded. The issue seems to be that it is operating on partial buffers and then having to copy remainder of that 1M buffer around as part is consumed. Coreutils 0.11 so…
How can a command which was explicitly designed to do nothing but read and write disk become CPU bound?
That's is famously not what 'dd' was designed to do. Its description in the original Unix 6th Edition manual was 'convert and copy a file'. It's infamous for people mis-remembering it as a disc copier when it was actually a file transcoding utility that understood EBCDIC and could re-block things.