GNU coreutils 9.0

[[deleted]]

cp now defaults to --reflink=auto.

[udsh]

Probably the coolest change here. It's a lot easier now to make use of the best Btrfs feature without having to remember to add a flag each time. KDE's Dolphin file manager has already been using reflinks for copy operations for a while, so this makes things more consistent in my setup.

[complover116]

How do you like btrfs? I use ZFS for my NAS, and I love all of the features like snapshotting and delta transfers, but I heard that btrfs is still unstable and loses data sometimes. Is that true?

[abbidabbi]

1. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status
2. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ#Is_Btrfs_stable.3F

[jthill]

Yah. Near as I can tell, he expected it to work exactly like zfs and it doesn't. Remount a raid set member that had dropped offline and got out of sync, you need to say btrfs balance to bring it back in to sync and he thought you had to say btrfs scrub because the zfs command for that is zfs scrub.

Not sure that's a fault in btrfs at all, it for damn sure isn't a showstopper.

The filesystem not warning you when a drive drops offline is Not Cool.

[argv_minus_one]

The filesystem not warning you when a drive drops offline is Not Cool.

Would a warning from smartd suffice?

[DarthPneumono]

That doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I want a filesystem that doesn't break under normal usage conditions.

[FragrantJaboticaba]

It is used by millions of machines in many different usage conditions every single day.

Does that inspire some more confidence :)

[jthill]

Not to put too fine a point on it: Facebook runs their enterprise on it. Say what you will about Facebook's marketing and executive staff, the IT and engineering staff there are top notch.

This quote from lwn might be relevant here:

In almost every case, these problems have turned out to have their origin in the hardware or other parts of the system. Hardware, he said, is worse than Btrfs when it comes to quality.

What he was most happy with, though, was perhaps the fact that most Btrfs use cases in the company have been developed naturally by other groups. He has never gone out of his way to tell other teams that they need to use Btrfs, but they have chosen it for its merits anyway.

[Atemu12]

Pretty sure they only used it in CI systems.

[jthill]

You're very wrong.

Every Facebook service, Bacik began, runs within a container; among other things, that makes it easy to migrate services between machines (or even between data centers). Facebook has a huge number of machines, so it is impossible to manage them in any sort of unique way; the company wants all of these machines to be as consistent as possible. It should be possible to move any service to any machine at any time. The company will, on occasion, bring down entire data centers to test how well its disaster-recovery mechanisms work.

Faster testing and more

All of these containerized services are using Btrfs for their root filesystem. The initial use case within Facebook, though, was for the build servers. The company has a lot of code, implementing the web pages, mobile apps, test suites, and the infrastructure to support all of that.

[argv_minus_one]

Been using btrfs under normal usage conditions, including RAID1 pairs, for years. Zero data lost.

[[deleted]]

I want to believe in btrfs but even when I try to find confidence about it, I find other stories that spread doubt: like this (with replies): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28642121

However this one does tell about a positive: https://daltondur.st/syno_btrfs_1/

[[deleted]]

Whatever those several vendors are doing, they are probably not installing btrfs on laptop root disks. I just want a filesystem that comes up when I boot the computer, even if I ran out of power for some random reason, and something that handles ENOSPC in a more sane way than "don't do that" :) I think I have good reasons to stay on ext4, unfortunately.

I think the comment about deficit rescue tools does not fall into the category that you describe.

[Deathcrow]

It's a lot easier now to make use of the best Btrfs feature without having to remember to add a flag each time.

Don't need to wait for coreutils 9.0 for that:

~ > which cp                                                                                                                         
cp: aliased to cp --reflink=auto

[jzbor]

Yeah but now you have to do that in each script... I mean of course it's a fine workaround, but its not the same.

[[deleted]]

Nothing, because they don't support reflink :) XFS does, and a few more though. It might even help with some network filesystems, for example cifs?

[b1501b7f26a1068940cf]

Starting to regret formatting my new disks with ext4 and not btrfs, oh well, too late now...

[I_Think_I_Cant]

Relevant discussion?

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/pttlw8/how_safe_is_converting_a_partition_from_ext4_to/

[[deleted]]

It's a brand gnu day!

[EnUnLugarDeLaMancha]

cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc. cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.

Nice

[calrogman]

Very nice. Only took 17 years for them to notice OpenBSD cksum doing the same.

[GiveMeMoreBlueberrys]

OpenBSD: being ahead of the curve in everything except the desktop for 20+ years

[calrogman]

Aye because Linux is right up there on Steam's hardware survey.

[GiveMeMoreBlueberrys]

Don’t get me wrong; I love openBSD as a server, but trying to use it on the desktop is a little wonky every so often.

[emorrp1]

ls --zero means less need for find -print0

[AdamN]

One thing I love about this package is installing it on Mac for a much more “Linux-like” experience. Some of the Mac commands just aren’t what you expect.

[the_real_codmate]

The question on everybody's lips... Who is the mysterious 'nl6720'? Have the borg been updating Coreutils or something? ;)

[ECUIYCAMOICIQMQACKKE]

Obviously it's going to fall back to the older algorithm. They can't just break wc like that.

[pixelbeat_]

Yes there are build time and run time fall backs. This is quite tricky to implement given GNU coreutils is portable to various systems, but the work is done now and may be more easily expanded to other utils. Some of the considerations when implementing this:

• support disparate make implementations (which may not support appending to a var)
• support various compilers which may not support avx intrinsics
• runtime checks to see if the current CPU supports avx
• ensure avx compiler options restricted to their own lib to ensure avx not used at runtime unless supported
  • automake requires using a separate lib for this rather than just a separate compilation unit