Not a sysadmin, but a programmer. My work machines have been:

• 2003-2008 Windows 7
• 2008-2011 Ubuntu
• 2011-2019 Arch
• 2019-2024 NixOS

Probably going to keep using NixOS. This is a very cool OS.

Yeah, I’m also one of these people silently enjoying systemd and wayland. Every now and then there’s fuzz on one of these. I shrug, and move on still enjoying both of them.

That is correct.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x-9900x

Rust and Cargo enters the room.

128 GB here which runs out if I compile the complete project at work with -j32. And this sucks because 128 GB right now means the RAM cannot run super fast, meaning it is a bottleneck to any modern Ryzen…

We’ve been using Linear in my latest company and it is actually quite good. No bullshit fast UI, boards, issues linking with Git, a support that can take a feature request that is often implemented in a week or two after asking it.

In my experience, nix works exceptionally well with Rust. Python and JavaScript are nastier, especially if the libraries use C extensions.

Zenarmor ftw.

Musl can be a bit annoying compilation target sometimes. Usually it works but I’ve debugged bugs a few times that were due to musl target.

I prefer my distro with glibc…

But do not run Linux, the kernel.

His job is to not get the maintainers to agree, but his job definitely is to bark a bit if somebody behaves like Ted.

It might even be Rust is not meant for Linux kernel and it will never happen. Or it happens in the driver layers, but stays out from the core. We do not know yet. The concern Ted is raising is definitely valid: if the C APIs change, people who work daily in the C code cannot spent cycles fixing the Rust APIs. These people have their day jobs which pays them to maintain these subsystems, and it is at least not yet clear will these employers fund rewriting anything in Rust. There are tens of filesystems in Linux, with lifetimes passing around that are not documented and might not work in Rust.

Note: I’m a Rust dev for the past 10 years, and I follow this discussion with high interest.

Yeah. Isn’t it funny that the most popular file system in the world has such a codebase, and it is not even well documented how it works!

I have my reasons to choose XFS or bcachefs with my machines.

Yes and no. Linus can yell to people and he does, he can force his say as he has been recently doing by expecting sched_ext to land in 6.12. BUT. Linux is a bazaar, it’s so big and there are so many different factions forcing them to do anything is going to take a long time. Lots of different teams are working on Linux, with their own priorities.

The borrow checker is exactly what the kernel needs.

Ted is the maintainer of ext4 and there are not many people in the world who understand this code.

For Rust to succeed, it has to get the subsystem maintainers to agree. It is going to be many years of petting very angry bobcats…

And that is not even the worst I’ve heard, makes you a bit numb if you follow LKML.

Me neither, but the risk is there and well documented.

The point was, ZFS is not great as your normal laptop/workstation filesystem. It kind of requires a certain setup, can be slow in certain kinds of workflows, expects disks of same size and is never available immediately for the latest kernel version. Nowadays you actually can add more disks to a pool, but for a very long time you needed to build a new one. Adding a larger disk to a pool will still not resize it, untill all the disks are replaced.

It shines with steady and stable raid arrays, which are designed to a certain size and never touched after they are built. I would never use it in my workstation, and this is the point where bcachefs gets interesting.

But scrub is not fsck. It just goes through the checksums and corrects if needed. That’s why you need ECC ram so the checksums are always correct. If you get any other issues with the fs, like a power off when syncing a raidz2, there is a chance of an error that scrub cannot fix. Fsck does many other things to fix a filesystem…

So basically a typical zfs installation is with UPS, and I would avoid using it on my laptop just because it kind of needs ECC ram and you should always unmount it cleanly.

This is the spot where bcachefs comes into place. It will implement whatever we love about zfs, but also be kind of feasible for mobile devices. And its fsck is pretty good already, it even gets online checks in 6.11.

Don’t get me wrong, my NAS has and will have zfs because it just works and I don’t usually need to touch it. The NAS sits next to UPS…

It is only in TLS where you have to disable compression, not in HTTP.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/19911/crime-how-to-beat-the-beast-successor/19914#19914

Could you explain how a CRIME attack can be done to a disk?

I mean… If you have a ton of raw photos in one directory, you can enable the highest compression rate with zstd to it. Every other directory has lz4 with the fastest compression. Your pics take much less space, but the directory will be slower to read and write.

For me the reason was that I wanted encryption, raid1 and compression with a mainlined filesystem to my workstation. Btrfs doesn’t have encryption, so you need to do it with luks to an mdadm raid, and build btrfs on top of that. Luks on mdadm raid is known to be slow, and in general not a great idea.

ZFS has raid levels, encryption and compression, but doesn’t have fsck. So you better have an UPS for your workstation for electric outages. If you do not unmount a ZFS volume cleanly, there’s a risk of data loss. ZFS also has a weird license, so you will never get it with mainline Linux kernel. And if you install the module separately, you’re not able to update to the latest kernel before ZFS supports it.

Bcachefs has all of this. And it’s supposed to be faster than ZFS and btrfs. In a few years it can really be the golden Linux filesystem recommended for everybody. I sure hope Kent gets some more help and stops picking fights with Linus before that.