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Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

lovedaddy 12d ago
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- teekert 12d ago
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  - fhdkweig 12d ago
    > Ubuntu devs has been nothing good FOSS Did you mean nothing "but" good?
    - teekert 12d ago
      Yes, sorry and thanx, I played a bit with the sentence, not happy with the first thing I submitted -> Corrected now.
    - goodpoint 12d ago
      "nothing good" is more accurate
  - collinfunk 12d ago
    Legacy is a bit harsh... FWIW, Canonical did not reach out to any of us who maintain GNU coreutils before, after, or during the transition. Had we known, we could have easily warned them about the incompatibilities.
    - teekert 12d ago
      Yeah, shouldn't have called it legacy, perhaps OG would have been more appropriate.
  - testdelacc1 12d ago
    The account you’re replying to has 8 karma across 13 comments in the last 11 years. The other comments are about as good as the one you replied to.
  - egorfine 12d ago
    > Ubuntu devs have been nothing but good FOSS citizens They have forced systemd despite feedback and genuine concerns. They have forced fake sudo and uutils the same way. So, ideology over merit. That doesn't mean that all of the Ubuntu devs are this way, but this means that the company is consistent in its ways to hurt Linux.
    - teekert 11d ago
      “Hurd Linux”? Maybe leave that judgement to Torvalds. Canonical is a company they do what the CEO wants. And you are free to do what you want. Quick question: are the fruits of your labor mostly given away for free?
- jmclnx 12d ago
  Probably true, but the direction Linux is going these days is concerning
  - _ink_ 12d ago
    Care to elaborate?
    - amiga386 12d ago
      GPL -> MIT
      - skrtskrt 12d ago
        Does this actually matter that much for some tools when the kernel is GPL?
        amiga386 12d ago
        I does. The OP says "Linux" but means "Linux distros", which are made of thousands of "commingled" pieces (i.e. the licence of one piece does not affect the other). Each piece that becomes MIT means less pressure on corporate users to give back any changes they make, and we'll end back up in the 1980s again where "Amazon Linux" is full of secret-sauce they refuse to publish and makes the base system incompatible with "Google Linux" (or whatever happens to be kicking about), creating deliberate lock-in out of a system that started open. In much the same way that macOS and FreeBSD are divergent today.
        bigstrat2003 12d ago
        That doesn't matter. Amazon or whoever can add as much secret sauce as they like; people can freely use the original so there's no issue.
        amiga386 12d ago
        We've balkanized Linux but you're free to use the original (which we are deliberately incompatible with, as is rival #2, rival #3, rival #4, etc. and we're all mutually incompatible with each other)
collinfunk 12d ago
I 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 or directory
- ganelonhb 10d ago
  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…
- teekert 12d ago
  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.
  - collinfunk 12d ago
    I have. It has been an open bug upstream for years as well.
    - teekert 12d ago
      ok, that's concerning, if you post it here I'll vote for it (after confirming).
      - JdeBP 11d ago
        The Launchpad bug is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils/+bug/2167206 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils/+bu... . The apparently related bug in the origin project is https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/2949 https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/2949, filed back in 2022 and which sat unmoved for several years until, probably not coincidentally, almost the same time yesterday that this appeared on Hacker News.
asrk-qlwu 12d ago
From the company that distributed Amazon spyware (https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do) and now turns Debian into Slopian. No thanks.
bithammerthunde 12d ago
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- dralley 12d ago
  The project was started long before LLMs existed.
phendrenad2 12d ago
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- qwj18 12d ago
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- mid-kid 12d ago
  Ubuntu started out with a slogan claiming "linux for human beings", and it kept that reputation for well over a decade, with a heavy focus on the desktop. You can split hairs however you want, but this created a legacy, and is why Ubuntu is still one of the top recommended distributions for beginners.
- m4rtink 12d ago
  Cool aspirations but I don't think it has significant enterprise deployments compared to RHEL or SLES.
  - thesuperbigfrog 11d ago
    It looks like they have a few paying customers: https://technologychecker.io/technology/ubuntu https://technologychecker.io/technology/ubuntu And they are slightly behind RHEL: https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-server-market-share/ https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-server-market-shar...
Malakun 12d ago
You can use coreutils-from-gnu instead uutils. However since 26.04 build-essential depends on coreutils-from-uutils, it cannot be upgraded while coreutils-from-gnu is installed. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/build-essential/+bug/2148691 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/build-essential/+b...
- collinfunk 12d ago
  You can use equivs to create a dummy coreutils-from-uutils package, as mentioned in the responses to that report. It is frustrating that Canonical has no interest in fixing it, though. It makes it hard to take their claims seriously that you can still use GNU coreutils if you want.
  - dwattttt 11d ago
    You're specifically frustrated about unbounded stack recursion exhausting the stack, triggered by multiple thousands of directories? It doesn't sound like this is about multi-thousand-deep directory structures, it sounds like it's about something else. Because even diving into it, I would agree with a prioritisation decision that puts this bug down the bottom of a priority list.
    - LtWorf 11d ago
      This isn't the first issue with uutils. Canonical is just rushing the switch because they want to get rid of software with GPLv3 license, not because there is any technical merit for doing so.
      - throw0101a 11d ago
        If they want the default to be non-GPLv3 Rust-based that's fine, but some of us don't care (and want the same behaviour everywhere, like on RH-based systems we may also have) and they should leave the GNU as an option. Potentially both could be installed at the same time (it's what update-alternatives is for after all).
blastonico 12d ago
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- stonogo 12d ago
  Or just use Arch, and skip the pointless hype squad
  - wojciii 12d ago
    Funny .. Arch started growing on me.
    - sesm 11d ago
      SteamOS switched from Debian to Arch for a reason.
  - rvz 12d ago
    Or Pop!_OS that does not vibe slop their distro.
- tuananh 12d ago
  you are being sarcastic right?
- theandrewbailey 12d ago
  I went upstream and started using Debian instead. Don't listen to the haters: it updates at about the same frequency as Ubuntu LTS.
hk1337 12d ago
Was there something wrong with how they are currently written or do they just want the badge that says they converted to Rust?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 11d ago
  License. GNU is copyleft and the new thing is permissive. We might see a fracture open slowly. For me, even AGPL is not enough
  - zahlman 11d ago
    Once they have a more permissive license, cui bono?
    - pjmlp 11d ago
      Businesses. There is a reason all FOSS OS alternatives for embedded systems like Zephyr, NuttX, FreeRTOS, IDF, Arduino,... are not GPL based, while Google has purged Android and ChromeOS from it, with the Linux kernel being the only GPL piece left.
      - 1718627440 11d ago
        > Arduino,... are not GPL based Arduino is "just" repacked gcc in a nutshell, so it is GPL-based.
        pjmlp 11d ago
        You need more than a compiler, so it is complicated, and not pure GPL, https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-Licensing-for-products-based-on-Arduino https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L...
        1718627440 11d ago
        I was only thinking about the software, yes. Also a lot of the "Arduino" libraries are not really owned by Arduino, even if they like to attach themself to it, so while it is true what they write about different licenses of the libraries, this what not what I considered to be part of Arduino itself. I was only thinking of the buildtools they release. While these are board specific, these are often "just" a fork of gcc, board-specific linker/image builders, a flasher and the Arduino-build system. Only the latter is what they actually created (arguable not even that: https://arduinohistory.github.io/ https://arduinohistory.github.io/).
goodpoint 12d ago
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Arcuru 12d ago
Has the code quality in that repo gotten to a good point then? I haven't followed it much, but last I looked[1] (which was a few years ago) almost every tool I looked at in detail had pretty bad performance or correctness issues. [1] https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/ https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/
- egorfine 12d ago
  The reason for existence of uutils is ideological, not technical. Thus code quality is of no use for the objective.
  - stouset 12d ago
    I’m a huge proponent of Rust and generally lean a lot closer to the RIIR mentality than most, but this effort seems to be such a waste of effort and resources. There have been a dozen CVEs reported against all of coreutils in the past twenty years. The most recent audit of uutils-coreutils turned up forty-four CVEs. By all appearances they’re replacing battle-tested and fundamental tooling which hasn’t been a problem with extremely amateurish Rust. The threading highlighted in the linked post above seems pretty egregious.
    - egorfine 12d ago
      Same here. Love Rust. Hate rust rewrites.
      - noosphr 11d ago
        The worst thing about rust are the people using it.
        LtWorf 11d ago
        My impression is that go developers moved to rust.
perarneng 12d ago
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- stouset 12d ago
  There have been twelve CVEs reported against coreutils in the past twenty years. There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit. I am all for RIIR in cases where it makes sense. This does not even remotely appear to be one of them. By all appearances the quality of the code is extremely amateurish at best. coreutils has not been a significant source of vulnerabilities in the past, and they’re replacing it with code written by amateurs that performs worse and already has a worse security track record.
  - Ygg2 12d ago
    > There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit. Was there an audit against coreutils? If not, it's not really apple-to-apple comparison.
    - stouset 12d ago
      It doesn’t even matter. The sheer disparity in vulnerabilities over twenty years versus one year is impossible to hand-wave away. We are talking about fourfold more CVEs over a twentyfold reduction in time.
      - gpm 11d ago
        It really does matter. I don't know enough about this specific case, but multiple order of magnitude differences in CVE numbers are frequently explained by different policies towards finding and assigning CVEs in many many cases. Absent more information the default should be to hand wave it away as probably such a difference. CVE counts are not a even slightly reliable metric.
        collinfunk 11d ago
        Most of them are TOCTOU races or improperly following symbolic links. For example, uutils mkfifo(1) would create a world-readable and writable FIFO before using chmod(2) to restrict its permissions. Another user could replace that file with a symbolic link between the mkfifo(3) call and the chmod(2) to change the permissions of arbitrary files [1]. Other ones I find concerning are that you could also bypass '-- no-preserve-root' with a symbolic link to root [2]. Or by using paths equivalent to "/", e.g., "/../" [3]. Historically, GNU coreutils has been pretty good with symbolic links and avoiding TOCTOU races. The only notable one I can remember is a chmod(1) bug [4]. I agree with your general point that the number of CVEs is a useless metric, though. [1] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35352 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35352 [2] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35349 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35349 [3] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35338 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35338 [4] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/425b8a2f534fe02e8c1e39ad6a3d2c18eca12de3 https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/425b8a2f534fe0...
dsign 11d ago
Hmm, this doesn’t make sense. You simply don’t replace utilities with many decades of maturity and that “just work” with something that is not as mature. It will open all users of the distro to all sorts of subtle and not so subtle bugs. I for one don’t want to find myself staring at a mysterious segfault when I want to build the latest version of nodejs or flash a microcontroller. It’s such a pity; I have used Ubuntu for close to 23 years.
- someothherguyy 11d ago
  then install the other tool. no one is holding a gun to your head. it isn't windows.
  - nairboon 11d ago
    Like how one can easily not use snap on Ubuntu? /s
    - deleted 11d ago
      [deleted]
- overfeed 11d ago
  on the other hand, Rust is memory safe!
  - rurban 11d ago
    Almost, but not really
arjie 11d ago
Everything online reminds of when Ubuntu switched to dash for init scripts or something. Good times.
SubiculumCode 11d ago
So what is the way forward for Linux to have sandboxi g as strong as Android? Appimage everything? I know it's possible now hacking together things, but I mean by default and integrated.
- uecker 11d ago
  Maybe we could develop trustworthy free-software applications again, instead of trying to establish a commercial apps ecosystem on top of Linux?
- bayindirh 11d ago
  Amutable. Building an immutable and image based system which even the installer can't modify, a-la macOS. One systemd patch at a time.
  - 1718627440 11d ago
    This is actually already required to be supported by complying to the FHS.
  - LelouBil 10d ago
    Immutable OSs are great, I'm running a custom image based on Bazzite for a couple of years now. But that doesn't solve the user sandboxing problem, flatpaks and xdg portals does. Still, a lot of portals are still missing or not fully implemented, but it's getting there !
    - bayindirh 10d ago
      At the end of the day, a sandbox is a slice/cgroup. i.e.: Kernel's ability to create a complete bubble around a process or set of processes. My beef is not with immutable OSes or sandboxes or else. They all have use cases and reasons. My primary beef is being locked out of my own system without my consent. I want to own my personal (esp. Linux) systems, that's all. I'm also against erosion of Free Software ecosystem for something looking open, yet non-buildable or modifiable by the end user. This is why I don't like permissive licenses and essential software to be licensed-washed from Free to Open.
t0duf0du 11d ago
I was bummed when I came across this: https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs/issues/1299 https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs/issues/129...
- werdl 11d ago
  I don't understand - I thought sudo-rs was supposed to be a drop-in replacement? If it implements a subset of features how can this be the case?
  - collinfunk 11d ago
    I don't think sudo-rs ever advertised itself as a drop in replacement. They seem pretty upfront that it isn't their goal. See this list: https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs#differences-from-original-sudo https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs#difference...
    - t0duf0du 11d ago
      Its not that if they have advertised themselves as a drop-in replacement or not. What made me bummed that cannonical used it as drop-in replacement and it did break some of my installation scripts.
  - swiftcoder 11d ago
    the uutils project bills themselves as a drop-in replacement for coreutils. sudo-rs does not bill itself as a drop-in replacement for sudo
- LelouBil 10d ago
  Is it just me or does anyone else have the impression that the "chlampel" user only posts LLM-generated messages
grougnax 11d ago
Can’t wait for the whole Rust rewrite of Linux!
erminpour 11d ago
Whether you like Rust or not, it's questionable as to why Canonical would push this so much and do it in such a cavalier way. Will this really make coreutils more secure? I doubt it, if anything there will be a river of new bugs. So, again, why are they pushing Rust so much? Having Microsoft make Rust a 'Tier-1' language also doesn't bode well.
- pjmlp 11d ago
  Canonical has been pushing its own agenda for ages, how many examples do you need? Microsoft making Rust tier 1 is great, it means probably one day we get a VS proper support instead of VSCode only. If you head off to Microsoft official blogs, you will find out that Microsoft already has tier 1 support for Java (ironically), Python and Go, besides the usual .NET languages and C++.
  - torginus 11d ago
    Why does 'Ubuntu defaultism' still exist in the Linux world? Them replacing packages with shitty unworkable broken snap substitutes that can break the system when updating, and have a habit of reinstalling themselves...
    - pjmlp 10d ago
      Because of The Year of Linux Desktop and being the favoured distro among OEMs for their hardware.
    - tmtvl 10d ago
      They were for a long time the only big distro which made it easy to install non-free drivers.
- pantalaimon 11d ago
  It removes a GPLv3 dependency that might stop some companies from adopting Ubuntu Core.
  - 11d ago
Surac 11d ago
Other distros are based of ununtu. Will the all ship with crippled coreutils from now on?
- suby 11d ago
  Linux Mint mentioned on their blog that they would be using the Rust versions.
sehw 11d ago
People still use ubuntu when Debian and Mint exist?
- LtWorf 11d ago
  The power of marketing… Ubuntu does offer some certifications but only for paying customers, so everyone else should really steer clear.
- pjmlp 11d ago
  Yes, proprietary hardware support out of the box, and pre-installed option by the few OEMs that sell GNU/Linux computers.
  - PunchyHamster 11d ago
    My nvidia GPU worked just fine. Debian has non-free repo you know...
    - pjmlp 11d ago
      I know how well it has worked in practice since the Walnut Creek CDROMs were a thing.
    - LtWorf 11d ago
      Nowadays the non-free-firmware repo is active by default, so the normal official debian image actually works. It used to be the case that the normal download from the homepage was often useless because it didn't support most networking hardware, but this is no longer the case now.
      - spider-mario 11d ago
        How long ago was that? I tried Debian about 15-20 years ago and I don’t recall encountering that issue. (The issue I do remember encountering was random kernel panics that I didn’t have with Ubuntu on the same machine.)
nalekberov 11d ago
If you ask their motivation? "We want to make them safer" They worked pretty fine for decades, now, who needs these rewrites? Not saying it's useless, but in practice, what benefits did this bring?
- froh 11d ago
  it's GPL free. which is good for embedded, the business side of it. like cars.
  - justincormack 11d ago
    The kernel is still GPL
    - rcxdude 11d ago
      but GPLv2
      - froh 11d ago
        and deliberately so, as it would be infinitely hard to upgrade the kernel license. alas, only GPL-3 gives the right to repair and modify the TV or car or refrigerator you own...
  - rwmj 11d ago
    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.
    - LtWorf 11d ago
      Car manufacturers really really hate GPLv3 and the requirement that users need to be able to change the code. They claim it is for compliance but it's well known that user modifications to cars are no longer the responsibility of the car company. I think it's more on principle than any real legal concern.
WatchDog 11d ago
Fil-C[0] can compile GNU coreutils, it has stronger* memory safety guarantees than rust, none of the compatibility issues that a wholesale rewrite has, and performance that seems to be within about a factor of two[1] compared to the normally compiled code.. [0]: https://fil-c.org/ https://fil-c.org/. [1]: https://bannalia.blogspot.com/2025/11/comparing-run-time-performance-of-fil-c.html https://bannalia.blogspot.com/2025/11/comparing-run-time-per... * Guaranteed to crash rather than potentially grant arbitrary code execution.
- quotemstr 11d ago
  "Stronger" is absolute bullshit. No data race prevention. No intra-object protection. Mandatory GC, and 5x the compute cost. Nothing like a statically safe language.
  - logicchains 11d ago
    It's coreutils, there shouldn't be any threads to be data racing.
    - tcfhgj 11d ago
      Haven't threads been one of the reason some core util got faster?
      - collinfunk 11d ago
        Only GNU sort uses threads. There is still some room for improvement there, if anyone wants to take a shot at it. :)
        zamadatix 11d ago
        I think I saw the Rust based implementations sometimes used a separate thread for background tasks like statistics reporting. Not much additional in the way of "directly" using threads, but I wonder how many could actually be any faster with direct threading.
Alien1Being 11d ago
Ubuntu continues on it's quixotic mission to kill Linux...
atoav 11d ago
I would be very curious about a bit more concrete and substential criticism what is bad (or good) about how the both versions, that goes beyond general arguments like: Just because it is Rust, it is not safe! It worked before, don't replace it! etc. Not that these are not valid points of criticism, but in my opinion if we have two core utils we can (and should) pick the better one after careful continous evaluation. And if the old one is the better one on the day of the release, so be it. Having two competing solutions can have benefits for everybody looking for the best core utils they can get in the long run. I had to reimplement and reverse engineer old tech myself as part of my dayjob and had those engineers seen my results it probably would have improved their work as well, since I usually found oddities that they probably did not intend to be that way. This means my work on their work could be seen as another pair of eyeballs, bullet-proofing their original work, instead of seeing me as a threat. That additional pair of eyeballs is crucial to open source software. This is why it is sad that too much about this whole discussion feels like yet another culture war, heated on the stove of social media figures looking to convert heat into ad revenue. Which is why I would love to have more concrete points of technical criticism of specific bits maybe even to specific lines in the code or specific reproducable behavior. If we go the culture-war route nobody wins, if we discuss both solutions on their merits, we all can win.
- mrheosuper 11d ago
  > since I usually found oddities that they probably did not intend to be that way. Or it could be you don't have the context like they did. Maybe some hardware bug/quirk that happens on some exotic machine that you don't have.
- rcxdude 11d ago
  I think a lot of the actual issues they're encountering are that the underlying POSIX APIs have a lot of sharp edges which the older versions of the tools have had enough time to work around, while the newer ones are generally running into the same rakes that have been there for decades. It takes a fair amount of time for those to be found and dealt with (though it also takes use, so it's a bit chicken-and-egg).
- 1718627440 11d ago
18Deepnar 11d ago
how helpful is it for it to be transitioned to rust, how does it help?
ramon156 11d ago
if the argument is "but bugs!" then that's a nothing burger. Your old code is more battle-tested, but that doesn't inherently make it better. I wish more companies thought like this.
- 6031769 11d ago
  It may not inherently make it better (for some meanings of "better") but it certainly makes it more secure and more stable. Those are attributes which I would value very highly in coreutils.
gramakri2 11d ago
We already had a problem with sudo-rs not handling all the options that previous sudo did. I am quite surprised sudo-rs is now the default even.
whatsakandr 11d ago
They could just compile the core utils with fil C and call it a day.
INTPenis 11d ago
They should do like Solaris did and offer multiple different core tools in different paths, until they're up to par at least. It's not that complex of a workaround. I don't use Ubuntu but this is huge, it's just as big as when FreeBSD switched to all BSD licensed user tools, I remember having to learn how tar worked again.
hermitShell 11d ago
Manny comments I agree with - it's a mistake, it's a reason to leave the distro... I'd like to point out that Ubuntu/Canonical is now seemingly philosophically separate from the origins of GNU and Linux. If you're curious, read "Hackers" by Stephen Levy. They've lost the plot, so to speak, about the core spirit of open software and hardware, which is what gave the projects life in the first place. A philosophical understanding and unity between many, many top notch independent developers. Another note is how AI contributions to such libraries and programs is going to have an unknown effect on quality. It's almost like there's a business case to rip all the good FOSS written by humans out of the hands of github and apt, and curate all the best source code to ensure it remains in circulation, and extant copies are available that are not washed out by loose standards WRT AI contribs. Or if not a business case, perhaps a reasonable reaction and a good personal vendetta.
pessimizer 11d ago
Next step, make them subtly incompatible with gnutils. Then make them a Ubuntu dependency, then a systemd/Gnome dependency. Then take Ubuntu closed source. Success, suckers!
linsomniac 11d ago
ProTip: You can switch back to Gnu coreutils on 26.04 with: apt install coreutils-from-gnu coreutils-from-uutils- --allow-remove-essential And pin it so an upgrade doesn't flip it back with: printf 'Package: coreutils-from-uutils\nPin: release a=*\nPin-Priority: -10\n' \ | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/uutils > /dev/null
- chris_st 11d ago
  Just curious, why the 'sudo tee {file} > /dev/null'?
  - c0balt 11d ago
    it writes to the file with elevated priviledges and doesn't write it back to the terminal, effectively a 'sudo sh -c '{cmd} > {file}''. sudo tee is a common way to work around priviledge restrictions in shell pipes (you can't easily 'sudo' a pipe), if /secure was 0600 and owned by root: "sudo echo "test" > /secure" or "sudo printf '' > /secure", would not work because your user's shell process can't write to /secure. However, "echo 'test' | sudo tee /secure" works because the elevated 'sudo tee' can write to the file.
    - chris_st 10d ago
      Cool, thanks!
linsomniac 11d ago
Beware 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 solves that but 26.04 is at v0.8. I've always used "bs=32k" because decades ago I did some testing and found that seemed to be large enough that it reduced the overhead while not being so large that it caused other problems, one of the most noticeable being scheduler issues where performance went into the toilet, especially on SD or USB thumb drives. Using this also seems to work better with rust coreutils dd.
- dale_glass 11d ago
  Why are we still using dd? Seriously, it's a weird obtuse command. Weird syntax that doesn't match anything else, and the block size shouldn't be needed 99% of the time. A modern tool should figure out a good value on its own, either by interrogating the devices at both ends, or by benchmarking, or both.
  - dijit 11d ago
    I don’t know of a better tool that operates on raw blocks, maybe there is one. `dd` is a real power user command, I’d prefer that it isn’t doing “intelligent” things, especially not by default.
    - akdev1l 11d ago
      cp file.iso /dev/sda
      - ewy1 11d ago
        this works great but in my experience sometimes you should add && sync not sure why it's necessary only sometimes!
lrvick 11d ago
Meanwhile I just booted stagex on AWS without any C code at all other than the kernel and libc. In a dev branch we now have rust ssh, dhcp, init, job management, etc. Rust all the things. Very soon will be able to swap the kernel for Asterinas and drop the last couple libc dependencies to have a complete rust OS that is Linux binary compatible. I wonder how many other distros will rustmax.
synergy20 11d ago
one more reason back to Debian
forest_brothers 11d ago
[dead]
hwc 11d ago
I had no idea they were doing this; good for them! 1. What fraction of the core OS can be switched over? Can they oxidize systemd? 2. Are other distros going to switch over (e.g. Debian, which I think of as the ur-distro)?
t43562 11d ago
I had a go at making an Ubuntu package recently - and to setup a PPA for it. That was a nightmare from hell that I gave up on (from ambiguous documentation, to 100s of how-tos that don't quite work for my case to making a package build in their system). To me it seems odd that coreutils is worth footling with when other problems seem to stand out to me.
1saadcodes 11d ago
I'm struggling to see the upside of replacing working coreutils when the replacement still has bugs that the old implementation doesn't. Rust being safer is nice, but that doesn't help much if the new rm segfaults
rurban 11d ago
How can you undo that. Is `sudo apt install coreutils` enough?
xemdetia 11d ago
One thing that was sneaky was that how the rust coreutils are laid out invalidated a bunch of AppArmor.
foresto 11d ago
I 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?
puskavi 10d ago
i love uncircular wheels my new car came with
miniBill 8d ago
As someone who loves rust: this is dumb. They're not even close to ready

[flagged]

teekert 12d ago
[flagged]
- fhdkweig 12d ago
  > Ubuntu devs has been nothing good FOSS Did you mean nothing "but" good?
  - teekert 12d ago
    Yes, sorry and thanx, I played a bit with the sentence, not happy with the first thing I submitted -> Corrected now.
  - goodpoint 12d ago
    "nothing good" is more accurate
- collinfunk 12d ago
  Legacy is a bit harsh... FWIW, Canonical did not reach out to any of us who maintain GNU coreutils before, after, or during the transition. Had we known, we could have easily warned them about the incompatibilities.
  - teekert 12d ago
    Yeah, shouldn't have called it legacy, perhaps OG would have been more appropriate.
- testdelacc1 12d ago
  The account you’re replying to has 8 karma across 13 comments in the last 11 years. The other comments are about as good as the one you replied to.
- egorfine 12d ago
  > Ubuntu devs have been nothing but good FOSS citizens They have forced systemd despite feedback and genuine concerns. They have forced fake sudo and uutils the same way. So, ideology over merit. That doesn't mean that all of the Ubuntu devs are this way, but this means that the company is consistent in its ways to hurt Linux.
  - teekert 11d ago
    “Hurd Linux”? Maybe leave that judgement to Torvalds. Canonical is a company they do what the CEO wants. And you are free to do what you want. Quick question: are the fruits of your labor mostly given away for free?
jmclnx 12d ago
Probably true, but the direction Linux is going these days is concerning
- _ink_ 12d ago
  Care to elaborate?
  - amiga386 12d ago
    GPL -> MIT
    - skrtskrt 12d ago
      Does this actually matter that much for some tools when the kernel is GPL?
      - amiga386 12d ago
        I does. The OP says "Linux" but means "Linux distros", which are made of thousands of "commingled" pieces (i.e. the licence of one piece does not affect the other). Each piece that becomes MIT means less pressure on corporate users to give back any changes they make, and we'll end back up in the 1980s again where "Amazon Linux" is full of secret-sauce they refuse to publish and makes the base system incompatible with "Google Linux" (or whatever happens to be kicking about), creating deliberate lock-in out of a system that started open. In much the same way that macOS and FreeBSD are divergent today.
        bigstrat2003 12d ago
        That doesn't matter. Amazon or whoever can add as much secret sauce as they like; people can freely use the original so there's no issue.
        amiga386 12d ago
        We've balkanized Linux but you're free to use the original (which we are deliberately incompatible with, as is rival #2, rival #3, rival #4, etc. and we're all mutually incompatible with each other)

I 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 or directory

ganelonhb 10d ago
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…
teekert 12d ago
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.
- collinfunk 12d ago
  I have. It has been an open bug upstream for years as well.
  - teekert 12d ago
    ok, that's concerning, if you post it here I'll vote for it (after confirming).
    - JdeBP 11d ago
      The Launchpad bug is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils/+bug/2167206 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils/+bu... . The apparently related bug in the origin project is https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/2949 https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/2949, filed back in 2022 and which sat unmoved for several years until, probably not coincidentally, almost the same time yesterday that this appeared on Hacker News.

asrk-qlwu 12d ago

From the company that distributed Amazon spyware (https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do) and now turns Debian into Slopian. No thanks.

bithammerthunde 12d ago

[flagged]

dralley 12d ago
The project was started long before LLMs existed.

phendrenad2 12d ago

[flagged]

qwj18 12d ago
[flagged]
mid-kid 12d ago
Ubuntu started out with a slogan claiming "linux for human beings", and it kept that reputation for well over a decade, with a heavy focus on the desktop. You can split hairs however you want, but this created a legacy, and is why Ubuntu is still one of the top recommended distributions for beginners.
m4rtink 12d ago
Cool aspirations but I don't think it has significant enterprise deployments compared to RHEL or SLES.
- thesuperbigfrog 11d ago
  It looks like they have a few paying customers: https://technologychecker.io/technology/ubuntu https://technologychecker.io/technology/ubuntu And they are slightly behind RHEL: https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-server-market-share/ https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-server-market-shar...

Malakun 12d ago

You can use coreutils-from-gnu instead uutils. However since 26.04 build-essential depends on coreutils-from-uutils, it cannot be upgraded while coreutils-from-gnu is installed. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/build-essential/+bug/2148691 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/build-essential/+b...

collinfunk 12d ago
You can use equivs to create a dummy coreutils-from-uutils package, as mentioned in the responses to that report. It is frustrating that Canonical has no interest in fixing it, though. It makes it hard to take their claims seriously that you can still use GNU coreutils if you want.
- dwattttt 11d ago
  You're specifically frustrated about unbounded stack recursion exhausting the stack, triggered by multiple thousands of directories? It doesn't sound like this is about multi-thousand-deep directory structures, it sounds like it's about something else. Because even diving into it, I would agree with a prioritisation decision that puts this bug down the bottom of a priority list.
  - LtWorf 11d ago
    This isn't the first issue with uutils. Canonical is just rushing the switch because they want to get rid of software with GPLv3 license, not because there is any technical merit for doing so.
    - throw0101a 11d ago
      If they want the default to be non-GPLv3 Rust-based that's fine, but some of us don't care (and want the same behaviour everywhere, like on RH-based systems we may also have) and they should leave the GNU as an option. Potentially both could be installed at the same time (it's what update-alternatives is for after all).

blastonico 12d ago

[flagged]

stonogo 12d ago
Or just use Arch, and skip the pointless hype squad
- wojciii 12d ago
  Funny .. Arch started growing on me.
  - sesm 11d ago
    SteamOS switched from Debian to Arch for a reason.
- rvz 12d ago
  Or Pop!_OS that does not vibe slop their distro.
tuananh 12d ago
you are being sarcastic right?
theandrewbailey 12d ago
I went upstream and started using Debian instead. Don't listen to the haters: it updates at about the same frequency as Ubuntu LTS.

hk1337 12d ago

Was there something wrong with how they are currently written or do they just want the badge that says they converted to Rust?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 11d ago
License. GNU is copyleft and the new thing is permissive. We might see a fracture open slowly. For me, even AGPL is not enough
- zahlman 11d ago
  Once they have a more permissive license, cui bono?
  - pjmlp 11d ago
    Businesses. There is a reason all FOSS OS alternatives for embedded systems like Zephyr, NuttX, FreeRTOS, IDF, Arduino,... are not GPL based, while Google has purged Android and ChromeOS from it, with the Linux kernel being the only GPL piece left.
    - 1718627440 11d ago
      > Arduino,... are not GPL based Arduino is "just" repacked gcc in a nutshell, so it is GPL-based.
      - pjmlp 11d ago
        You need more than a compiler, so it is complicated, and not pure GPL, https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-Licensing-for-products-based-on-Arduino https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L...
        1718627440 11d ago
        I was only thinking about the software, yes. Also a lot of the "Arduino" libraries are not really owned by Arduino, even if they like to attach themself to it, so while it is true what they write about different licenses of the libraries, this what not what I considered to be part of Arduino itself. I was only thinking of the buildtools they release. While these are board specific, these are often "just" a fork of gcc, board-specific linker/image builders, a flasher and the Arduino-build system. Only the latter is what they actually created (arguable not even that: https://arduinohistory.github.io/ https://arduinohistory.github.io/).

goodpoint 12d ago

[flagged]

Arcuru 12d ago

Has the code quality in that repo gotten to a good point then? I haven't followed it much, but last I looked[1] (which was a few years ago) almost every tool I looked at in detail had pretty bad performance or correctness issues. [1] https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/ https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/

egorfine 12d ago
The reason for existence of uutils is ideological, not technical. Thus code quality is of no use for the objective.
- stouset 12d ago
  I’m a huge proponent of Rust and generally lean a lot closer to the RIIR mentality than most, but this effort seems to be such a waste of effort and resources. There have been a dozen CVEs reported against all of coreutils in the past twenty years. The most recent audit of uutils-coreutils turned up forty-four CVEs. By all appearances they’re replacing battle-tested and fundamental tooling which hasn’t been a problem with extremely amateurish Rust. The threading highlighted in the linked post above seems pretty egregious.
  - egorfine 12d ago
    Same here. Love Rust. Hate rust rewrites.
    - noosphr 11d ago
      The worst thing about rust are the people using it.
      - LtWorf 11d ago
        My impression is that go developers moved to rust.

perarneng 12d ago

[flagged]

stouset 12d ago
There have been twelve CVEs reported against coreutils in the past twenty years. There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit. I am all for RIIR in cases where it makes sense. This does not even remotely appear to be one of them. By all appearances the quality of the code is extremely amateurish at best. coreutils has not been a significant source of vulnerabilities in the past, and they’re replacing it with code written by amateurs that performs worse and already has a worse security track record.
- Ygg2 12d ago
  > There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit. Was there an audit against coreutils? If not, it's not really apple-to-apple comparison.
  - stouset 12d ago
    It doesn’t even matter. The sheer disparity in vulnerabilities over twenty years versus one year is impossible to hand-wave away. We are talking about fourfold more CVEs over a twentyfold reduction in time.
    - gpm 11d ago
      It really does matter. I don't know enough about this specific case, but multiple order of magnitude differences in CVE numbers are frequently explained by different policies towards finding and assigning CVEs in many many cases. Absent more information the default should be to hand wave it away as probably such a difference. CVE counts are not a even slightly reliable metric.
      - collinfunk 11d ago
        Most of them are TOCTOU races or improperly following symbolic links. For example, uutils mkfifo(1) would create a world-readable and writable FIFO before using chmod(2) to restrict its permissions. Another user could replace that file with a symbolic link between the mkfifo(3) call and the chmod(2) to change the permissions of arbitrary files [1]. Other ones I find concerning are that you could also bypass '-- no-preserve-root' with a symbolic link to root [2]. Or by using paths equivalent to "/", e.g., "/../" [3]. Historically, GNU coreutils has been pretty good with symbolic links and avoiding TOCTOU races. The only notable one I can remember is a chmod(1) bug [4]. I agree with your general point that the number of CVEs is a useless metric, though. [1] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35352 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35352 [2] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35349 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35349 [3] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35338 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35338 [4] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/425b8a2f534fe02e8c1e39ad6a3d2c18eca12de3 https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/425b8a2f534fe0...

dsign 11d ago

Hmm, this doesn’t make sense. You simply don’t replace utilities with many decades of maturity and that “just work” with something that is not as mature. It will open all users of the distro to all sorts of subtle and not so subtle bugs. I for one don’t want to find myself staring at a mysterious segfault when I want to build the latest version of nodejs or flash a microcontroller. It’s such a pity; I have used Ubuntu for close to 23 years.

someothherguyy 11d ago
then install the other tool. no one is holding a gun to your head. it isn't windows.
- nairboon 11d ago
  Like how one can easily not use snap on Ubuntu? /s
  - deleted 11d ago
    [deleted]
overfeed 11d ago
on the other hand, Rust is memory safe!
- rurban 11d ago
  Almost, but not really

arjie 11d ago

Everything online reminds of when Ubuntu switched to dash for init scripts or something. Good times.

SubiculumCode 11d ago

So what is the way forward for Linux to have sandboxi g as strong as Android? Appimage everything? I know it's possible now hacking together things, but I mean by default and integrated.

uecker 11d ago
Maybe we could develop trustworthy free-software applications again, instead of trying to establish a commercial apps ecosystem on top of Linux?
bayindirh 11d ago
Amutable. Building an immutable and image based system which even the installer can't modify, a-la macOS. One systemd patch at a time.
- 1718627440 11d ago
  This is actually already required to be supported by complying to the FHS.
- LelouBil 10d ago
  Immutable OSs are great, I'm running a custom image based on Bazzite for a couple of years now. But that doesn't solve the user sandboxing problem, flatpaks and xdg portals does. Still, a lot of portals are still missing or not fully implemented, but it's getting there !
  - bayindirh 10d ago
    At the end of the day, a sandbox is a slice/cgroup. i.e.: Kernel's ability to create a complete bubble around a process or set of processes. My beef is not with immutable OSes or sandboxes or else. They all have use cases and reasons. My primary beef is being locked out of my own system without my consent. I want to own my personal (esp. Linux) systems, that's all. I'm also against erosion of Free Software ecosystem for something looking open, yet non-buildable or modifiable by the end user. This is why I don't like permissive licenses and essential software to be licensed-washed from Free to Open.

t0duf0du 11d ago

I was bummed when I came across this: https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs/issues/1299 https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs/issues/129...

werdl 11d ago
I don't understand - I thought sudo-rs was supposed to be a drop-in replacement? If it implements a subset of features how can this be the case?
- collinfunk 11d ago
  I don't think sudo-rs ever advertised itself as a drop in replacement. They seem pretty upfront that it isn't their goal. See this list: https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs#differences-from-original-sudo https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs#difference...
  - t0duf0du 11d ago
    Its not that if they have advertised themselves as a drop-in replacement or not. What made me bummed that cannonical used it as drop-in replacement and it did break some of my installation scripts.
- swiftcoder 11d ago
  the uutils project bills themselves as a drop-in replacement for coreutils. sudo-rs does not bill itself as a drop-in replacement for sudo
LelouBil 10d ago
Is it just me or does anyone else have the impression that the "chlampel" user only posts LLM-generated messages

grougnax 11d ago

Can’t wait for the whole Rust rewrite of Linux!

erminpour 11d ago

Whether you like Rust or not, it's questionable as to why Canonical would push this so much and do it in such a cavalier way. Will this really make coreutils more secure? I doubt it, if anything there will be a river of new bugs. So, again, why are they pushing Rust so much? Having Microsoft make Rust a 'Tier-1' language also doesn't bode well.

pjmlp 11d ago
Canonical has been pushing its own agenda for ages, how many examples do you need? Microsoft making Rust tier 1 is great, it means probably one day we get a VS proper support instead of VSCode only. If you head off to Microsoft official blogs, you will find out that Microsoft already has tier 1 support for Java (ironically), Python and Go, besides the usual .NET languages and C++.
- torginus 11d ago
  Why does 'Ubuntu defaultism' still exist in the Linux world? Them replacing packages with shitty unworkable broken snap substitutes that can break the system when updating, and have a habit of reinstalling themselves...
  - pjmlp 10d ago
    Because of The Year of Linux Desktop and being the favoured distro among OEMs for their hardware.
  - tmtvl 10d ago
    They were for a long time the only big distro which made it easy to install non-free drivers.
pantalaimon 11d ago
It removes a GPLv3 dependency that might stop some companies from adopting Ubuntu Core.
- 11d ago

Surac 11d ago

Other distros are based of ununtu. Will the all ship with crippled coreutils from now on?

suby 11d ago
Linux Mint mentioned on their blog that they would be using the Rust versions.

sehw 11d ago

People still use ubuntu when Debian and Mint exist?

LtWorf 11d ago
The power of marketing… Ubuntu does offer some certifications but only for paying customers, so everyone else should really steer clear.
pjmlp 11d ago
Yes, proprietary hardware support out of the box, and pre-installed option by the few OEMs that sell GNU/Linux computers.
- PunchyHamster 11d ago
  My nvidia GPU worked just fine. Debian has non-free repo you know...
  - pjmlp 11d ago
    I know how well it has worked in practice since the Walnut Creek CDROMs were a thing.
  - LtWorf 11d ago
    Nowadays the non-free-firmware repo is active by default, so the normal official debian image actually works. It used to be the case that the normal download from the homepage was often useless because it didn't support most networking hardware, but this is no longer the case now.
    - spider-mario 11d ago
      How long ago was that? I tried Debian about 15-20 years ago and I don’t recall encountering that issue. (The issue I do remember encountering was random kernel panics that I didn’t have with Ubuntu on the same machine.)

nalekberov 11d ago

If you ask their motivation? "We want to make them safer" They worked pretty fine for decades, now, who needs these rewrites? Not saying it's useless, but in practice, what benefits did this bring?

froh 11d ago
it's GPL free. which is good for embedded, the business side of it. like cars.
- justincormack 11d ago
  The kernel is still GPL
  - rcxdude 11d ago
    but GPLv2
    - froh 11d ago
      and deliberately so, as it would be infinitely hard to upgrade the kernel license. alas, only GPL-3 gives the right to repair and modify the TV or car or refrigerator you own...
- rwmj 11d ago
  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.
  - LtWorf 11d ago
    Car manufacturers really really hate GPLv3 and the requirement that users need to be able to change the code. They claim it is for compliance but it's well known that user modifications to cars are no longer the responsibility of the car company. I think it's more on principle than any real legal concern.

WatchDog 11d ago

Fil-C[0] can compile GNU coreutils, it has stronger* memory safety guarantees than rust, none of the compatibility issues that a wholesale rewrite has, and performance that seems to be within about a factor of two[1] compared to the normally compiled code.. [0]: https://fil-c.org/ https://fil-c.org/. [1]: https://bannalia.blogspot.com/2025/11/comparing-run-time-performance-of-fil-c.html https://bannalia.blogspot.com/2025/11/comparing-run-time-per... * Guaranteed to crash rather than potentially grant arbitrary code execution.

quotemstr 11d ago
"Stronger" is absolute bullshit. No data race prevention. No intra-object protection. Mandatory GC, and 5x the compute cost. Nothing like a statically safe language.
- logicchains 11d ago
  It's coreutils, there shouldn't be any threads to be data racing.
  - tcfhgj 11d ago
    Haven't threads been one of the reason some core util got faster?
    - collinfunk 11d ago
      Only GNU sort uses threads. There is still some room for improvement there, if anyone wants to take a shot at it. :)
      - zamadatix 11d ago
        I think I saw the Rust based implementations sometimes used a separate thread for background tasks like statistics reporting. Not much additional in the way of "directly" using threads, but I wonder how many could actually be any faster with direct threading.

Alien1Being 11d ago

Ubuntu continues on it's quixotic mission to kill Linux...

atoav 11d ago

I would be very curious about a bit more concrete and substential criticism what is bad (or good) about how the both versions, that goes beyond general arguments like: Just because it is Rust, it is not safe! It worked before, don't replace it! etc. Not that these are not valid points of criticism, but in my opinion if we have two core utils we can (and should) pick the better one after careful continous evaluation. And if the old one is the better one on the day of the release, so be it. Having two competing solutions can have benefits for everybody looking for the best core utils they can get in the long run. I had to reimplement and reverse engineer old tech myself as part of my dayjob and had those engineers seen my results it probably would have improved their work as well, since I usually found oddities that they probably did not intend to be that way. This means my work on their work could be seen as another pair of eyeballs, bullet-proofing their original work, instead of seeing me as a threat. That additional pair of eyeballs is crucial to open source software. This is why it is sad that too much about this whole discussion feels like yet another culture war, heated on the stove of social media figures looking to convert heat into ad revenue. Which is why I would love to have more concrete points of technical criticism of specific bits maybe even to specific lines in the code or specific reproducable behavior. If we go the culture-war route nobody wins, if we discuss both solutions on their merits, we all can win.

mrheosuper 11d ago
> since I usually found oddities that they probably did not intend to be that way. Or it could be you don't have the context like they did. Maybe some hardware bug/quirk that happens on some exotic machine that you don't have.
rcxdude 11d ago
I think a lot of the actual issues they're encountering are that the underlying POSIX APIs have a lot of sharp edges which the older versions of the tools have had enough time to work around, while the newer ones are generally running into the same rakes that have been there for decades. It takes a fair amount of time for those to be found and dealt with (though it also takes use, so it's a bit chicken-and-egg).
1718627440 11d ago

18Deepnar 11d ago

how helpful is it for it to be transitioned to rust, how does it help?

ramon156 11d ago

if the argument is "but bugs!" then that's a nothing burger. Your old code is more battle-tested, but that doesn't inherently make it better. I wish more companies thought like this.

6031769 11d ago
It may not inherently make it better (for some meanings of "better") but it certainly makes it more secure and more stable. Those are attributes which I would value very highly in coreutils.

gramakri2 11d ago

We already had a problem with sudo-rs not handling all the options that previous sudo did. I am quite surprised sudo-rs is now the default even.

whatsakandr 11d ago

They could just compile the core utils with fil C and call it a day.

INTPenis 11d ago

They should do like Solaris did and offer multiple different core tools in different paths, until they're up to par at least. It's not that complex of a workaround. I don't use Ubuntu but this is huge, it's just as big as when FreeBSD switched to all BSD licensed user tools, I remember having to learn how tar worked again.

hermitShell 11d ago

Manny comments I agree with - it's a mistake, it's a reason to leave the distro... I'd like to point out that Ubuntu/Canonical is now seemingly philosophically separate from the origins of GNU and Linux. If you're curious, read "Hackers" by Stephen Levy. They've lost the plot, so to speak, about the core spirit of open software and hardware, which is what gave the projects life in the first place. A philosophical understanding and unity between many, many top notch independent developers. Another note is how AI contributions to such libraries and programs is going to have an unknown effect on quality. It's almost like there's a business case to rip all the good FOSS written by humans out of the hands of github and apt, and curate all the best source code to ensure it remains in circulation, and extant copies are available that are not washed out by loose standards WRT AI contribs. Or if not a business case, perhaps a reasonable reaction and a good personal vendetta.

pessimizer 11d ago

Next step, make them subtly incompatible with gnutils. Then make them a Ubuntu dependency, then a systemd/Gnome dependency. Then take Ubuntu closed source. Success, suckers!

linsomniac 11d ago

ProTip: You can switch back to Gnu coreutils on 26.04 with: apt install coreutils-from-gnu coreutils-from-uutils- --allow-remove-essential And pin it so an upgrade doesn't flip it back with: printf 'Package: coreutils-from-uutils\nPin: release a=*\nPin-Priority: -10\n' \ | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/uutils > /dev/null

chris_st 11d ago
Just curious, why the 'sudo tee {file} > /dev/null'?
- c0balt 11d ago
  it writes to the file with elevated priviledges and doesn't write it back to the terminal, effectively a 'sudo sh -c '{cmd} > {file}''. sudo tee is a common way to work around priviledge restrictions in shell pipes (you can't easily 'sudo' a pipe), if /secure was 0600 and owned by root: "sudo echo "test" > /secure" or "sudo printf '' > /secure", would not work because your user's shell process can't write to /secure. However, "echo 'test' | sudo tee /secure" works because the elevated 'sudo tee' can write to the file.
  - chris_st 10d ago
    Cool, thanks!

linsomniac 11d ago

Beware 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 solves that but 26.04 is at v0.8. I've always used "bs=32k" because decades ago I did some testing and found that seemed to be large enough that it reduced the overhead while not being so large that it caused other problems, one of the most noticeable being scheduler issues where performance went into the toilet, especially on SD or USB thumb drives. Using this also seems to work better with rust coreutils dd.

dale_glass 11d ago
Why are we still using dd? Seriously, it's a weird obtuse command. Weird syntax that doesn't match anything else, and the block size shouldn't be needed 99% of the time. A modern tool should figure out a good value on its own, either by interrogating the devices at both ends, or by benchmarking, or both.
- dijit 11d ago
  I don’t know of a better tool that operates on raw blocks, maybe there is one. `dd` is a real power user command, I’d prefer that it isn’t doing “intelligent” things, especially not by default.
  - akdev1l 11d ago
    cp file.iso /dev/sda
    - ewy1 11d ago
      this works great but in my experience sometimes you should add && sync not sure why it's necessary only sometimes!

lrvick 11d ago

Meanwhile I just booted stagex on AWS without any C code at all other than the kernel and libc. In a dev branch we now have rust ssh, dhcp, init, job management, etc. Rust all the things. Very soon will be able to swap the kernel for Asterinas and drop the last couple libc dependencies to have a complete rust OS that is Linux binary compatible. I wonder how many other distros will rustmax.

synergy20 11d ago

one more reason back to Debian

forest_brothers 11d ago

[dead]

hwc 11d ago

I had no idea they were doing this; good for them! 1. What fraction of the core OS can be switched over? Can they oxidize systemd? 2. Are other distros going to switch over (e.g. Debian, which I think of as the ur-distro)?

t43562 11d ago

I had a go at making an Ubuntu package recently - and to setup a PPA for it. That was a nightmare from hell that I gave up on (from ambiguous documentation, to 100s of how-tos that don't quite work for my case to making a package build in their system). To me it seems odd that coreutils is worth footling with when other problems seem to stand out to me.

1saadcodes 11d ago

I'm struggling to see the upside of replacing working coreutils when the replacement still has bugs that the old implementation doesn't. Rust being safer is nice, but that doesn't help much if the new rm segfaults

rurban 11d ago

How can you undo that. Is `sudo apt install coreutils` enough?

xemdetia 11d ago

One thing that was sneaky was that how the rust coreutils are laid out invalidated a bunch of AppArmor.

foresto 11d ago

I 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?

puskavi 10d ago

i love uncircular wheels my new car came with

miniBill 8d ago

As someone who loves rust: this is dumb. They're not even close to ready