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Maintained/released the GNU coreutils for the last 10 years https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commits?author=pixelb https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/

• lloydatkinson 4y ago
  > Meta's backend operating system for the last 7 years Sounds interesting, I had no idea Facebook had their own OS - presumably a Debian derivative?
  • pixelbeat__ 4y ago
    No, it's completely built from source, and finely tuned to the vast/quite homogeneous hardware, and deployment model. Though yes it is Linux based.
    • MBCook 4y ago
      If I can ask do you mean like a customized distribution with what I assume to be a heavily patched kernel? Or is it just the kernel with a totally new/different userland from a normal “Linux” box?
      • pixelbeat__ 4y ago
        Totally custom userland, though does reuse common open source components
        • MBCook 4y ago
          Neat. Thanks.
        • lloydatkinson 4y ago
          What was the reasoning for it though? Just seems a huge time sink for questionable gain.
          • pixelbeat__ 4y ago
            You're not considering the scale. We have faster iteration than upstream distros. More flexible. More tuned. I won't give exact details but 1% CPU gives extremely significant monetary savings, and there are at least 15% savings from static linking, PGO, LTO, more appropriate `-march`, more appropriate CPU security sharing considerations, ... Billions of dollars per year, in essentially electricity and required systems savings (considering the scale of serving 3 billion users a day). Also devs get access to the latest compilers, language levels, and libs, completely independent of distros, who have a more general compat issue to contend with. Considering there are about 30k tech in Meta this value also multiplys up.