LINUX Unplugged - 459: Better than Butter

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

We take a sneak peek at some future tech coming to Linux, and share details on HP's new laptop that runs POP!

You realize you've got three different distributions in front of you right now? You've got Nix, you got Arch, and you got Ubuntu going on right now. This is a busy day for Wes Payne. He's like frantically trying to get things installed. How are you doing over there? I know it's a big task for today's show. Um, well, plan A didn't work out just yet, but plan B? Going to plan?

Plan A required me nuking and paving my perfectly awesome Fedora 36 setup. That was going to happen regardless of the plan. Okay, maybe. So then I put Arch on there because we wanted some newfangled kernel patches for today's show. And I look over there, and you're loading nicks on that thing. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, HP has announced a new laptop that ships with Pop!OS aimed at developers. We'll share our thoughts on that. And then, why we're getting excited about Bcash FS and how it compares to Butter FS. Your workstation's got a new file system inbound. If you do anything in media production or have large files or perhaps gaming, you're going to want to stay tuned to this. And then we'll round out the show with some boosts, some picks, and a lot more.

So before we go any further, let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual Linux users group. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello, Wes and hello, Brent. Hi, everyone. Good to have you here. Our Mumble Room is open every Sunday when we do the show. Mumble is free software and we have a quiet listening lobby if you just want a low latency Opus audio stream. And then of course, we do the show. Mumble is free software, and we have a quiet listening lobby if you just want a low-latency Opus audio stream. And then, of course, we have the on-air area. And then we use Mumble for office hours and other productions here on the network, so it's always nice to have it ready to go,

and we often have community events on there too. We have more details at linuxunplugged.com slash mumble. Speaking of meetups and community, though, it looks like Alex is putting together a London meetup for Saturday, August 6th, 2022 in the London area. We'll have details at meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. Oh, I wish I could go. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Me too. So go in our stead audience. Make sure Alex won't be there by himself. Yeah. Make sure it's a party. Take some pictures. Share them. Make us jealous. So go in our stead audience. Make sure Alex won't be there by himself. Yeah. Make sure it's a party.

Take some pictures. Share them. Make us jealous. So that way we have to go to the next one. I already have something booked for that first week of August. I want to go so badly. But if you're in the London area or anywhere near there and you'd like to go, we'll have the details at meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. I think Alex is still taking input from the community too on

ideas and whatnot yeah so now's the time to put your input in if you think you might be available or want to make it but we all just got done traveling all of all three of us were just traveling and we survived we did honestly sometimes i don't know how we do it that last bit of my drive was really crazy but we all had i think a pretty decent trip considering what could have gone wrong uh brent i believe you successfully smuggled back something from the united states into canada do you want to out yourself uh you say something like it was only one thing so i'm not exactly sure which one you're talking about any hints oh you can you tell us what's that one extra organ oh um actually i I wonder which one you're latching on to.

But maybe one of the one that's exciting me is Alex gave me a phone that is not like a potato, which a potato on fire, which I think is a really good thing. Your last one here was actively hazardous to those around you. Yeah. I mean, it's a good conversation starter. Yeah. I mean, I've heard stories of battery expansion, but I've never actually seen one that bad in person and then seen somebody continue to use it. So I'm surprised they even let you on the airplane with that bomb. It keeps my thigh warm, you know? Well, so are you going to transition to the new phone now?

You got a whole strategy? Well, you know, I know Drew's listening and I got into a car accident trying to get the lovely phone he gave me. So thank you, Drew. And then basically Alex had one for me as well because they're both sweethearts. And he said I couldn't live in his house anymore if I didn't switch phones. So he forced me to switch to this new wonderful OnePlus 6 that he had kicking around like he does. I got to say, Chris, the transition was the thing that I was dreading. I feel like we're so used to having the desktop and things are, I don't know, seem much easier to transition there than they do on an Android phone. And I was right. It was a total pain and I haven't even moved everything over. And I just, so cringy. It was just, I tried a few,

you know, pieces of software that are trying to help you and none of them worked. And some people will say, well, Google has this thing where you just, you know, backs up your entire phone and then gives it back to you. But that's not in my realm of interest. So I did it the old way and I had to, you know, peck at the phone for about six different sessions. It's probably a little more challenging because you're trying to do this, I would imagine, without using Google services. Yeah, well, I figure, you know, you should be able to do this on the local network, right? Well, I guess you should.

Oh, it's painful. Yeah. It's painful. And the other thing is, I don't think I'm maybe a representative regular user. I would imagine we all have so many different little, I have like two or three VPN, different types of VPNs on there now. And that's just a small example

of all the different crazy stuff I'm working with on there. You do make your own life difficult. Maybe that's a nice way to put it. You know, though, I think once you're done, it's going to be worth it. That's a good phone. It's going to last you a good while, especially how long you get out of these phones.

It'll be a worthwhile transition. And every time you do these transitions, too, at least for me, I always find like, oh, I need to do a better job at figuring out my two-factor stuff. Or I need to do a better job at making sure this is backed up. So it's, you know, in a way, it's better to identify this stuff now than just when your phone actually caught on fire. I did also take the opportunity to install Lineage on there, which I haven't used since the CyanogenMod days way back. I had like a dream that I installed it on. It's nice to catch up like that too. Yeah. So far, they just came out with a new version. It's a little bit buggy, but they've been putting out updates like crazy. So I'm excited to find out how that's going to be. I would love to hear your experience with that as time goes on.

Maybe we'll do a little bit of a long-term look back and see what you think. Wes, you were on assignment last week, assignment to party. Tell the class where you went and how it went. Yes, I was in the fine city of New Orleans. Ah, that's nice. It was warm, I imagine. Yes, I was in the fine city of New Orleans. Ah, that's nice. It was warm, I imagine. Yes, 91, an incredibly sticky last day I was there, which I chose to sort of wander around as much as I could,

which meant I was quite tired for the ride home. It worked out nicely. No, it was great. I mean, amazing food, amazing drinks, but there was one drink I didn't get to have, so I'm curious maybe if there's any audience members out there who have good places in mind next time I'm back, and that the the ramos gin fizz oh that sounds great it's tall creamy citrusy with sky-high foam you've got gin lemon lime cream simple syrup orange blossom water egg white and soda egg white the original recipe calls for 12 minutes of shaking.

It's more of a meringue at that point. Yeah, it does sound like a dessert. But, you know, you want a good one, and it's mostly these days considered a brunch drink is my understanding. So you need to find a place that has a bar staff who's willing to make you this fancy-ass drink and make it for you at like 11 a.m. That's very true. Well, I'm glad you got a chance to go down there and enjoy yourself. That sounds really like I have probably a handful of places in the U.S. that I've never been to that are really high on my list.

And that's definitely one of them. It sounds like it was probably a really good time. Did you, Wes, did you enjoy any music while you were there? It seems like that would be a thing to do. Oh, yeah, of course I did. I mean, you'd have to be an idiot not to. Well, you just wander around the French Quarter and there's music spilling out of all the doorways. Nice.

That does sound really nice. That's great for somebody who likes to walk around too, like yourself, and you take it all in. Well, maybe one day we'll do a meetup down there. Get a chance to check it out. You can show me around. I also have a story on my travels that involves a drink. Because you know I am when I read like usernames. Super accurate. Yeah. Very good at pronunciations. And I'm very, very good at figuring out people's usernames and reading them completely accurately and pronouncing them accurately. And so that really good skill I have

apparently also applies to like looking up restaurants. And I kid you not, I found a place called Mamosas. And I didn't even think of mimosas, right? Because I'm an idiot. And I don't know what's wrong with how I read, but that's just how my brain works. So I like, let's go get breakfast to this place called Mamosas. We show up and of course, it's like a brunch place

that specializes on all of these different mimosas and a bunch of other really good things. That sounds like a great find. And I got myself like a pomegranate mimosa and it was fantastic and just really hit the spot. So I was in Southern Oregon in the Grants Pass area and it was beautiful. You know, mid-May, mid to late May. It's just such a gorgeous time down there. And I was getting some repairs done. Brent knows that we just took horrendous damage coming into Denver. And it resulted in

some of my suspension kind of just getting smashed. And so I was just getting the last bits of that fixed up. And then I was getting upgraded leaf springs put in. So now Jupes is better equipped for the rougher road conditions that seem to be out there. And I think in part the roads have just gotten worse since I've gotten the RV. There's just a lot of infrastructure that needs work. So when I take her in, I get her fixed and I tend to do a little upgrading. And now I've got these really new robust custom made leaf springs put in there. And I've got a bunch of Kony shocks and all this really nice stuff like sumo springs and sway bars. I mean, she's really she's really dialed in.

She's, she's a better drive than the day, the day she came off the lot. No doubt about it. And we're just wrapping up and we thought we'd get out of there Tuesday evening. I figured I'd get back up here. I'd be here for self hosted and the Bitcoin dad podcast.

And we'd be, we'd be good to go. Tuesday evening rolls around. I'm like, you know, guys, this has taken a bit longer than we expected. Do you think you'd be okay heading out wednesday well yeah you know it's fine we got our home here i'll contact west we'll figure out how we're

going to record land we'll get it all we'll get it all solved wednesday comes rolling by oh man guys um so here's the thing we have we found this we think we should probably get this fixed it's pretty important for your steering. This is going to be an issue if you don't solve it. And in the back of my mind, I know all these shops, they're booked out until the end of September. So if we want to go on a JB road trip this summer, I got to get this fixed now. Now or never. Now or never, Wes.

I mean, literally, they're all booked out until the end of September because I've called around. I'm like, all right, let's take care of it. So Thursday day goes by. They get it all taken care of. We're looking really good. They want to do a test drive. So we schedule all that for Friday morning. I think we're going to get out of here. It's going to be fine. Should be all right. As they're wrapping up doing their test drive, can you guys, can one of you guess a completely unrelated system that exploded that left us stranded and put us right up against that the last minute mark and it's not levi no levi was good completely unrelated to the work we're doing just as they're about to wrap up just as we're about

to pull out of the lot we had literally another system in the rv up. Any guesses? Anybody have a guess? I have a guess from trends. I'll call them trends. And I don't want to say that this might be it, but is it related to a clear fluid that gives life to most things on earth? Water? No. No? Really? Oh, I was sure it was going to be water. Thankfully it was not water. Well, that's good. No, we had a hydraulic line that we use for our jacks rip open and spew hydraulic fluid all over the motor and the transmission, which created a tremendous amount of smoke. And there is a lot of hydraulic fluid. So it just dumped. But here's the other thing. When the hydraulic system is pulling the

jacks up, that's when it pressurizes. And so the jacks began to fall down because the system was losing pressure as the RV is moving. So then the pump kicks in, in overtime, to pull the jacks back up, right? So then it's just pumping as much hydraulic fluid through the system as it possibly can because it's trying to keep those jacks up and so there is just fluid dumping all out the bottom of jupes all right down over the transmission because that's right where the hydraulic lines run over is the transmission the transmission of course is like 175 degrees so it ignites right we're getting we're getting like close to like full-on combustion this all happens in the lot of the shop so we stop the rig shut it all down we figure out the

hydraulic pump is running like crazy we go out there we disconnect it from power so it shuts down we let everything cool down it's a mess and then we're trying to figure out what went wrong and you look through you follow the hydraulic line through the engine up over the transmission where they have it hooked to the chassis with like a loop that's running through a metal loop and that model that metal loop had a little bit of a rubber on there to help to help just keep things from rubbing but that rubber had fallen off and so these hydraulic hoses were just chafing against a metal loop over the transmission and so it just cut them until they burst.

Yeah. So totally unrelated to the work. But they told us that they've had customers' rigs burned down. You're so lucky this happened where it did and when it did. Imagine we were on the road or something. I know. I imagine I was on the freeway. Oh, my.

If it was even hotter out. Not only that, but then the shop, like, sprung into action. They brought the rig back into the shop. They personally, like the techs, personally went over to another business in town, brought them our busted line, and had that shop manufacture us a custom new line to fit, which is more robust. And then they brought it back and hooked it all up for us and got us out of there by the afternoon so we could make it back here for the kids and do the show. Just a huge, huge win. Henderson's lineup in Grants Pass, Oregon. Totally recommend them. And now, you know, not only that, but Jupes is in better shape than ever with the suspension. But for a hot moment there, it got really treacherous. So I'm glad that they took care of it for us. I'm glad it happened there in the parking lot, literally in the parking lot, where we could react quick, quick we could jump out figure out what's going on disconnect the power to the pump and and take care of it before anything got you know on fire and

if she was up to full temperature who knows what would have happened i don't know i know i'm always telling you the horror stories here on the show i feel like i'm looking at the chat room right now and i feel like the chat room is like oh oh, my God, this sounds like a disaster. First of all, yeah, don't get an RV. But second of all, what I don't tell you is all of the great memories and the cool places we'd park and all that stuff that happens all the time. I'm just telling you about the really dramatic things that are fun to share on air. But we are looking forward to a West Coast summer road trip coming up later this year. And I want Jupes to be ship shape and we want to

do several meetups down the road. So we're going to have more details about that. We're brainstorming and planning that in the Office Hours podcast, which you can catch at officehours.hair. But let's talk about Linux for a moment. It's for people who like to mess with computers. computers. So HP has announced the HP Dev 1. It is an AMD powered Linux laptop, has an AMD Ryzen 7 Pro processor. It also has an AMD GPU, a 14 inch anti-glare display, one terabyte of NVMe storage by default, 16 gigs of RAM by default. But perhaps the most interesting detail about this laptop is that it ships with Pop! OS pre-installed. Pop! OS from System76 is pre-installed on this laptop. And our understanding is that this has been a relationship that has been months in the making and includes System76's staff training a team at HP to support Pop!OS

and then a contract or something in place that keeps System76 as a backup to HP support. So if you have an issue with this HP Dev1, you go through HP and then they can escalate to System76. I have two questions that come to mind from this. Minimac, I'm curious what your reaction is hearing Pop! OS pre-installed on a HP developer laptop. Yeah, we talked about that in the pre-show. I was asking myself, could it be that Pop! OS has become like a new stable standard for the user that expects that in five years from now,

his desktop will look the same as it does right now. We had the same thing like five years ago. If you installed Ubuntu, you could be sure that in two or four years, your system would still look the same. And that starts to change a little bit. So Pop!OS could become some kind of standard for Linux entry user.

I don't know. I mean, you could see a, I see what you're saying with like the Cosmic Desktop could create a standard user interface. You combine that with something like an Ubuntu LTS base. I think the other kind of big question there is why Pop!OS, right? You have sort of the assumed standard for developer laptops for years. If you go by the original of this formula, which is the Sputnik, is Stock Ubuntu. In fact, that was a very intentional choice. Dell had to learn the hard way not to do a custom Linux, and they took that feedback in from the community. And one of the lessons they internalized was that you do stock Ubuntu. But now we see someone going down this path in 2022, and they've chosen Pop! OS. And Brent, I'm curious to know your thoughts about this choice. I'm a little puzzled. I mean, I love this choice, but I'm a little puzzled because HP is kind of, you know, they've been around a while and Pop! OS, while they really know their stuff, as we know, is a relatively new distribution. So it feels like a gamble maybe on their part,

although it does sound like they're building a nice connection with those building the software on both sides. It sounds like a really nice, from what we know, relationship that's happening there. So it's not like they're just going into it blind. But I'm curious who, you know, they must have looked at choices and landed on Pop!OS.

And I have many more questions than I guess have answers at this point. And maybe we'll gather some of those in the future. It feels both exciting and kind of like fris risky at the same time. And surprising, right? Because there is the obvious element of somewhat cross-competition in hardware here.

You could argue that maybe the Kudu laptop is competitive with the Dev1 or something. And so there is maybe a clever like a Fox strategy at play here by System76. I agree with Brent. I've got a lot of questions i've been pondering this i have the sense that system 76 would probably answer any questions we have to the best of their ability i just haven't asked them yet because i'm still kind of processing this what about you it is interesting in one hand it's kind of comforting knowing that you know system 76 by this point kind of knows their way around this exact task and sector. And how would I feel about, let's say, HP wanted to do this but didn't have their help.

I could see this going kind of poorly if they don't have their beat on the Linux community in the same way. And I guess the Sputnik model, I mean, it's old, right? Sputnik happened a long time ago. And this is a sign that people are not sure exactly where Canonical's focus is. Not saying they're not in the desktop laptop, and that's exactly what HP's doing here. So that's kind of interesting. And I wonder if in a world of supply chain shortages and whatnot, if this isn't an area that System76 could apply a little bit of leverage, because they probably know the needs of a manufacturer like HP better than most shops, because they're a hardware manufacturer themselves. So that makes them sort of a sort of specially suited to interface with for a job like this. You know, I wonder as well if from HP's perspective, this might be a nice distinguishing factor. You know, nobody else is really doing this yet. And though it is kind of exciting. So

maybe that's a that's a good thing for HP. Yeah, it does. It does add sort of a special value that the other laptops don't have. You mentioned support as well, which is kind of an exciting add-on, isn't it? Yeah, this is still really early, too. We just know basically everything we've told you. Yeah, I'd really like to be able to go try out some configuration here because, I don't know, I'm not super wowed by the base. Some of the marketing material is like a little, I don't know, it's a little much. the base. Some of the marketing material is like a little, I don't know, it's a little much, you know, they're really trying to hit this like dev lineup hard, but it's not that shiny in that respect. Yeah. It feels like it's not quite hitting the note they're looking

for. It's coming across a little too obvious, a little too on the nose, but you know, you can see how these, how these organizations work, right? They've identified a category of user. And the great thing about dev is it's kind of like the way Apple uses the term pro. I think a lot of people just buy the dev edition that are considered themselves technical. Yeah, I'm technical. I need the fancy one, right? Yeah. And so it's sort of a term that they can kind of use that tells pretty much anybody who's an enthusiast, this might be the machine for you. You know, I look at this kind of stuff from the lens of media production. We do all of our media production on Linux. And so one of the things that we do to try to make that as smooth as possible

is we try to use hardware that's well-supported by the kernel, you know, stuff that's just baked in. And the shortcut to that is just use stuff that has open-source drivers. And that's the nice thing about this AMD hardware, is the GPU driver is open source. And that solves so many of the stability problems on desktop Linux right there. So, you know, that's what makes it appealing to me. We'll have a link if you want to check it out. Send us your questions.

Linuxunplugged.com slash contact or boost them into the show. We'll collect some of them and then try to open up some communications between HP System 76 and get some answers for y'all. account yeah you go there to support the show linode is a sponsor i am thrilled to work with because i honestly feel like they've been part of my secret sauce bringing jupiter broadcasting independent again going from zero to 100 miles per hour right demerging and creating a new business and keeping everything going keeping all the lights going it's like it's like fixing the bus as it's going down the road and And it would not have been possible without spinning up infrastructure at Linode. And the tooling to do that, their API, the command line clients, the pricing, the support behind it, it all plays a factor. They've been focused on this

for nearly 19 years, making it possible to just run applications on Linux and make it work great. And of course, I love the fact that they make it super simple to run any distribution you'd really want to, including the latest CentOS stylings out there, as we could call them. And of course, when you take advantage of our offer by going to lino.com slash unplugged, you get that $100. So you could try deploying some of their AMD Epic processor systems, try out their super fast rigs. They've got 11 data centers around the world. They have MVME PCIe storage available. Of course, they've got SSDs and everything as well. I mean, the options and the tiers

are going to fit perfectly with what you need, either for a personal site or something for your business. And I can say that because that's exactly what I do. I've got systems up there that just act as support systems to my RV. So that way I can synchronize and move data up into the cloud and then down to my RV over cellular connections. I use Leno to sort of like support infrastructure.

I consider them like my orbital systems that are supporting my RV and I personally pay for that. But over on the JB side of the house, we've been deploying to our audience and hitting higher numbers than ever. And Linode's been scaling with us all along the way. So for something personal or for something for your business, they've got the infrastructure for you. And they're not trying to lock you into some esoteric, crazy platform. Go try something, go learn something, and go support the show. And go try out the best cloud hosting in the business

and get $100 while you do it. Just go to linode.com slash unplugged. Now, gentlemen, I was just listening to Linux Action News this morning before we came on air, and you were talking quite excitedly about BcacheFS. And I'm curious if Wes got his paws deep, deep into this. This is something that we've been following for a while. Wes and I are both big fans of Kent Overstreet, the primary developer of BcacheFS, because he's creating a file system that could be a great replacement for my beloved XFS and ButterFS in one file system. You know, something that supports copy on write, something that has snapshots, but also really good performance. I mean, I think that's what attracts you to it as well, right? It's another chance at a modern file system, you know? I mean, even ButterFS, which is

pretty gosh darn new in terms of, you know, file systems. It started a long time ago and has seen many different eras at this point. And we have new ideas. We've learned a lot in the intervening years. BcacheFS is kind of neat because it comes from Bcache, which was already sort of almost the bottom half of a file system. It had a lot of the similar operations already sort of implemented in the kernel. Now, there needed to be some updates, and that's part of the work that Kent has been doing is sort of modernizing, improving things as the kernel has changed over the years there as well. But it means it wasn't totally starting from scratch. It's just kind of adding a lot of the nicer file system stuff on top, which means I'm not saying go put a bunch of

precious data in BcacheFS. Let's get that out of the way right now. But it's come a surprisingly long way. And I think in today's episode, which is suggesting, if you're curious, it's getting a little easier to actually give it a try and maybe even use it. Yeah, this is now entering the, we want to be confident when we switch to this. So let's start trying this out years in advance. I've lost track of how many years you and I have been tracking BcashFS. It's been a long time. Yeah, you know, Ken's got a Patreon. He gives some updates, but, you know, depending on how things are going,

that's maybe a couple of times a year. What changed recently is he gave a presentation at a conference about it, and then LWN did a great write-up of sort of detailing what they were talking about. Yeah, we recap that in Linux Action News, and we'll also have it linked here in the show notes so you can read up on it. But the long and the short is that there's been some big work done, and we're getting within the home stretch for mainlining it. So perhaps in the next six months to a year, we're going to see it land in the Linux kernel. Along with that, we're also, you know, getting an opportunity to really see how something like this comes along in the free software community. Something like this comes along in the free software community.

I was just speculating before the show started. I wonder how much money Apple spent developing APFS. I think I read somewhere. We don't really know. They don't share these details, right? But I think I read somewhere they spent five to six years internally developing APFS. You got to figure they had probably at least somewhere between three to a dozen engineers, perhaps more. A project manager at least.

How many millions do you suppose Apple spent developing APFS? And we've been watching BcashFS created out in the open, a file system that has a focus on performance. In fact, Kent says that some of the early adopters of BcacheFS are video production shops that need multiple 4K streams. They're already using it. And we've watched this rollout, and we're going to see it land in the Linux kernel, a multi-year project. And we get it for absolutely free. We get it for free as users, and we can see the whole thing be made. And this is truly how free software works. And so that's one of the reasons we've watched this project too. But now it's really not that hard to get a module installed on a current Linux box and get BcacheFS support.

So you built a custom NixOS image, which is one of the nice things you can do with Nix. Yeah, okay. So one way or another, you're going to have to get a new kernel, do some kernel building anyway, and get the BcacheFS patches integrated in. How you want to do that, you gotta still build that. And Nix, Nix has the Linux testing kernel with bcachefs available and built in their caches already. So that makes it really pretty darn quick to get it up and going and built and installed and available. And then because Nix is awesome, you can follow some directions in the NixOS wiki to build yourself a custom installer ISO. And then you can just right there, just in the same way you would on your system, you can specify like, hey, I want this kernel, I want these things installed. So when we started

thinking, all right, it's time. We've been sort of, you know, oohing and aahing from the sidelines for ages now. Let's try and get our hands at least a little bit dirty and try this stuff out. How are we going to do it? I don't know. It didn't seem like making you and Brent sign up for custom compiling your own kernel was necessarily fair. Thank you. It seemed like a nice, easy way to try to bridge the gap a little bit. Because here's an ISO you could just boot up

in a virtual machine or on real hardware and then you would have that stuff ready to go. This is why we were really attracted to NixOS. Picture what he just said and apply it to something like a workstation or a server environment. He has the primitives to build his own distro using the Nix tooling. And his distro comes preloaded with BcacheFS and the Test Suite and stuff like that. But we could just as easily have a distro that comes preloaded with

our specific Linux desktop environment, our favorite Linux application for recording audio, which is called Reaper, Mumble, and a web browser. And you could have a ready-to-go ISO image that just deploys the absolute latest versions of all that stuff on a box that Wes cooks up ahead of time. Now we're doing it for testing, which I could see us doing this more often too, right? This opens up a whole new world for us. So how is it going? Yeah, I will also just say a little bit more with the Nix love. That was like 12 lines because you just say like, hey, import the Nix config for the existing graphical GNOME install environment and then customize these couple of things. So, you know, like I put Nano on there for you guys.

Thank you. Thank you for doing that, Wes. We do appreciate that. I noticed Vim in there too, though. Oh, yeah. Well, I that. I noticed Vim in there too, though. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not a monster. So we wanted to maybe do a little A and B between BcashFS and ButterFS. We also just kind of wanted to get some general numbers.

So we're going to play around with this. And we thought maybe one of the ways we could kind of get some workstation-based performance metrics would be to throw the Heronics test suite at it. So you got that loaded on there now? I'm working on that at the moment. Oh, okay, okay. Well, it's going to take a long time to run is the main problem. So we do have FIO as well,

but maybe we should see what all do we want to run? Because part of my ideas here with Arch as well was maybe we put you on BcacheFS's route and see what happens there. I think there's kind of an open question of exactly all the ways we might want to evaluate this new file system.

Right, yeah. There's like, how does it do in just high-demand burst performance? How does it do as a daily driver? How does it do, you know, over a sustained period of time? Because it already has, not everything's there, like send and receive, not there yet.

You know, there's some optimizations that you'll see in the docs, which also need improvement, that haven't been applied yet. But there's already compression support, there's already multi-device support, there's already encryption support baked in, there's already snapshots baked in, and seemingly kind of different snapshots. That's where it's neat, too. Hmm, okay. i like this very similar user space interface is butter fs so you can just create a new sub volume they're called sub volumes

you can either create an empty sub volume or you can create one as a snapshot of another sub volume and by default they're writable and then you can snapshot those again so you can make like trees of snapshots however you like and they're very cheap to create at least the ears that will the docs say they're not based on cloning of copy on right b trees as with butter fs but instead are based on versioning of individual keys in the b trees many thousands or millions of snapshots can be created with the only limitation being disk space so i guess have at it. So that's part of the stuff too.

Like it'd be nice to maybe run some performance benchmarks on some of these XFS, say, ButterFS and Bcache and then go a little crazy with big files on there, put a bunch of snapshots, change some things in those snapshots. Yeah, like which one snapshots faster? Which one ends up eating my disk up more? Well, yeah, does it get sluggish after that? Does it start to take a long time to take a snapshot?

Yeah. So BcacheFS also, like I mentioned earlier, is a modern copy-on-write file system, which is what you want. In general, they've gone for a really clean, simple, and high-performance implementation of copy on write. So again, you're getting features that ZFS and ButterFS have, but you're getting them with an implementation towards performance. And BcacheFS itself is architected more like a file system that lives on top of a relational database with tables for the different file system data types. So you have different tables in there for your extents, your inodes, your extended attributes, etc. So it can look it up super fast. Now, before we do any benchmarks, we do want to see how things line up performance wise. I know Brent's got some questions. I've got some questions, but I'll hand the mic over to Brent. Go ahead. Get your questions in, Brent.

Okay. Well, I think my very first question is, I heard rumors that there might be some Rust connection here, maybe in a client or something, or they're trying to interact in a really nice way. Is that true? The Rust connection I think that you're thinking of is there is conversations about using some of the kernel's upcoming Rust support with BcacheFS. Sounds like Kent is definitely interested there. And I guess there's maybe already some Rust in some of the user space stuff. I would assume there's some features in Rust that are helpful in this case.

I don't know any of it, but it seems to me like those two might be a really nice complement. Well, there's also just, I mean, besides all the, you know, fancy compiler stuff and memory tracking and wrangling, you just get a nice developer experience, you know? It's got modern tooling with cargo.

And you've got people who are excited to work in it and learn it. You got momentum there too, which I think makes a difference. And so you take something that's new, like BcacheFS, and you kind of work with something that's got a lot of excitement, like Rust. And you can kind of see how it makes sense for some developers. Kent said that if other developers are passionate about getting Rust support in the Linux kernel, that they should speak up more because they want to see that happen. Although it's going to happen.

It's definitely going to happen. I think my second question is maybe more of a philosophical exploration. I know for like the last decade, we've been talking about sort of, you know, quote unquote, modern file systems and ZFS BannerFS have been wonderful. I'm sure there are others I don't know about. Personally, I feel like I'm always behind on that game, but my question then becomes... You're still running EXT3? Wow.

Right. It's so stable, well-understood, question mark. I guess my question is, do you think there will be a point at which we have all of the file systems we need? You know, some of the recent features that have come out in modern file systems are really, really helpful. But is there an end, you know, is there an end point? Or are we just going to consistently keep getting new and newer and newer file systems every, you know, five to ten years? It may be hard to separate that question from the underlying technology to, you know, like some stuff like F2FS sort of came around when Flash

really became popular. So to some extent, if the systems that we, you know, are storing things to change, then maybe our file systems have to. In a vacuum, I don't know, that might depend on our, you know, how many new cool theoretical or implementation tricks have we come up to make them faster. Yeah, I know that there are also just different approaches developers take depending on the type of storage medium. There is just different things about spinning rust than there is about an NVMe storage drive. And so you can optimize a file system for those differences and take advantage of that performance. And so you can optimize a file system for those differences and take advantage of that performance. And I think because we're always looking for faster performance and storage is generally increasing, I would imagine, and because you're always seeing different types of application workloads with different file requirements, I'd imagine we're always going to see new file systems coming around.

But the ones that really solve the high-end workstation use case, I think those are a little more rare. I wanted it to be ButterFS. I think ButterFS works great on like a laptop SSD or on a Raspberry Pi, but maybe BcacheFS could be even better for that role. I feel like you could go too far. You know, you could always have new file systems all the time, but experience has shown us that I think the Linux kernels actually, they're very careful about this kind of thing. And they don't just let any file system in. And Overstreet's been working on this for years to try to make this perfect as close as it can be to perfect. It's kind of funny in that regard because he's been quite cautious around when to submit for mainlining. Yeah, because nothing's going to be perfect software-wise.

But it's as close to stable as he can get it before he submits it. To the point that some of the other file system developers are like, hey, are you going to get this thing in or what? Because even some of the ButterFS folks have said, look, there's some stuff we might want to copy or learn, that you've been doing here that we might be able to take advantage of after the fact. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be nice to see, too. So, yeah, I think it's I think it's always going to be evolving, Brent. And I think there's just some for the different jobs and different hardware. That makes sense. I mean, as long as, you know, as long as there's someone to maintain it, then it's all right.

Well, let's hope there's always someone. All right. Well, those's hope there's always someone. All right, with those questions out of the way, let's see how it stacks up. ButterFS, BcashFS, BcashFS still in the pre-release phase. ButterFS, years in development, now in production. Compared side by side, how'd they do, Westpain? ButterFS has the edge. Oh!

Perhaps an unexpected result. 563 megabytes per second compared with 531 for the newbie BcacheFS. Oh! Well, not too surprising, I suppose, really, right? I mean, you got ButterFS on that system. Years of production optimization. But, you know, that seems kind of already decently competitive. Now these are early

numbers and we're just doing basic benchmarks here. And default mount options. That's right. I haven't customized a darn thing. Now we could throw XFS in here just to see, you know. You got enough room on there? I could do that, yeah. What are you, yeah. Okay.

All right, Wes Payne. How long will it take Wes Payne? I can barely get a sentence out today, so we'll see how long it takes him to get a partition out. Oh, it's already partitioned. Now we got FIO running. Oh, okay. Well, I just stole the ButterFS partition. Oh, yeah.

You know, we should mention while that benchmark is running, there is a bcachefs convert function. Like, you can convert. You can migrate. Yeah. So far, I've only tried it with ext4, but we could try it with this. It's kind of neat, though. It kind of

takes up the rest of the remaining space with its own file and then does some neat sort of offset tricks. So then you can go in, mount the new file system, take a look at its backup that basically gets you backup of your old file system, and then if that all looks good, delete the old stuff and reclaim your space. Okay, Wes Bain, I think your time's just about up. How did BcacheFS compare to the tried and true XFS, which has been around for decades,

finely tuned, refined, a file system I've used in production on terabytes and terabytes of data? At the moment, you can't shrink either of them, so they share that in common. Oh. How do they do performance-wise? Which one stacks up?

Oh, I'm sorry to say XFS looks like it's the clear winner. By about 100 megs per second. Yeah, so, bottom of the bunch is BcashFS, our newbie and somehow already new favorite.

531 megs. BeepButterFS is next at 563. And then at the top is XFS 629. Look, guys, we're going to bounce back from this. We're going to build back this file system even better. We're going to optimize. You know, it's going to be fine.

We're going to recover from this. I believe in Kent and the folks that contribute to this file system. It's early days. It's early days. But, you know, it's not about performance before they submit to the kernel. It's probably more about stability. Maybe the performance stuff doesn't really start getting worked out until it's on a lot of different systems. If you are going to start poking around with this,

there's a PDF doc, sort of like a maintainer administrator's guide, and well worth a read. There's a lot of some details about the underlying structure and what's different compared to stuff you might know, like ButterFS or CFS. And yeah, you'll see in there that there's definitely a lot of optimizations that, you know, Ken's got ideas about that are sort of planned, but just haven't been, you know, dotted those eyes yet. followed where they really try to get it rock solid and build on top of it and not have something they're trying to fix after the fact all the time, which I think is where some of the criticisms toward ButterFS have come from. Oh, here we go. I'm just going to migrate this XFS file system to Bcache now that we're done with it. Yeah, why not?

So you can do ButterFS, as far as we know, ButterFS, Extended 4, and XFS. I haven't tried ButterFS yet, but I could. I mean, I'm just curious. But it's exciting to watch this be developed. And it is for us a moment just because it is getting so close. Kent just did that update, which we'll link to. It's nigh. And I think when it ships, we'll give it another look, see if the performance situation has changed at all, see what the stability situation is looking like. And maybe in the meantime, we'll keep it on that system for a while. Yeah. You know, why not?

Yeah. Play around with it, play around with the snapshots, because that's part of the story too, is, you know, this is one test of many. And so we can throw the Pharonix workstation benchmark at it. We could see what the snapshot performance is like and get a better picture. I'd also really like to play with, you know, some of its multi-disk support because it's got its own take on erasure coding, you know, it's got its own version of RAID 5.6 sort of functionality that's totally a bit different than the, you know, failed ButterFS take, which is exciting on its own and the way that CFS does it too.

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and our secrets. And we got an email in from listener Brett. He said, you know, I tried out Bitwarden after you guys mentioned it on the show. I loved it so much for my personal use. I even got the paid tier to support them. And then I went one step further. I managed to convince my manager of the awesomeness of Bitwarden and then the CIO, which resulted in me getting to roll out the self-hosted enterprise instance for our entire IT team. I don't know how we managed without it now. Brett, I totally know what you mean. In fact, it's a little scary to think how it used to get managed before Bitwarden. It's great for individuals. It's great for teams. It's even great for your friends and family because having secure passwords, having a unique secure password at

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Once again, we got some great feedback. You can go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact to send some of that. Thank you very much. Peter wrote in with some great suggestions, continuing the conversation on booting ARM. So in Linux Unplugged 456 and also 457, where the issue of booting an ARM and the general fragmentation of the ARM platform was discussed, the issue of booting on ARM and the general fragmentation of the ARM platform was discussed. He mentions that there's a great project that, in his opinion, needs to be mentioned in this context called Taboot. That's taboot.org. Taboot has the goal of making booting on ARM boring, which I think in this case is probably a good thing. It's a U-boot distribution that implements

eBBR for UEFI, like booting, and is a true game changer for the devices it supports, notably the Pine64 PinePhone Pro and the PineBook Pro. Installing the generic ARM64 Fedora image on the PineBook Pro was a breeze. Now I can use Grub on my ARM notebook and press a key to boot from sd card or usb instead bonus he says taboo was started by samuel dion riel who's an xos committer and the founder of mobile nixos that is so neat you know my dream setup is net booting a bunch of like cm4s or something in the studio like you turn you turn on the studio, they all netboot into an OS that's living on the server somewhere.

Boot to Reaper. Perfect. Yeah. I don't know why I've always been into that, but I always have. I've always loved the idea of essentially just a thin client on the front end and then a centralized backend server that I control, that I update the image on, that we deploy once and then everything gets it. We can build some sweet NixOS Pixie images, that's for sure.

Totes could. Totes. And now it is time for the boost. Hey, I want to mention for, I don't know, the next few weeks at least, we are doing a 15% split with all of our boosts. So this is something that's possible with the value for value block in the podcasting 2.0 namespace. We have added the OpenSats organization to our split. So when you boost the show, 15% of your sats will go to support contributors for free and open source projects. The OpenSats Foundation is a nonprofit. 100% of the money that they raise goes to free software projects that are taking lightning payments. And there's some going to throw 15% of your sats over to open sats. All you've got to do is send us a boost, and they get a contribution for,

I don't know, I think we'll do it for like three weeks or something like that while we experiment with this. Michael wrote in with a boost with 15,000 sats. Thank you. He writes, Hi, Chris and team. I have listened to JB Podcast since 2012 and love it. 2012, that's a long time. That's older than you are, Chris and team. I have listened to JB Podcast since 2012 and love it. 2012, that's a long time. That's older than you are, Brent. Nearly.

I hope you find a good, sustainable way for you and your team. I like the value for value model with the pay sets while streaming. Thanks. Well, thank you, Michael. Yeah, the value for value model has been something that I think is resonating really well with some of you out there. Some people are still warming up to the idea, but I think when we expand the idea to free software, it's really going to be magic.

We got a double boost from Michael. I didn't even know that was allowed. Yeah, a double boost for 3,000 sats, and he just was feeling the value for the NVIDIA coverage. This is a good example. He listened to our coverage on LAN and Linux unplugged. I think he got a better understanding out of that, and he wanted to return that value with 3,000 sats. And he sent a note specifically thanking us for LUP458's coverage, which Christian joined us for

that to help cover some of the deets with NVIDIA's new driver situation, which is really exciting. The Golden Dragon boosted in with 1,111 sets just to make it hard for us to read. The more and more I hear about this foray into putting the kernel stuff as open source, the more excited I get for the future of the Linux desktop experience. Currently, I have to use a script

to control my GPU cooling fans. So maybe once this is complete, this will just work flawlessly? I'd love to see these kinds of things improve now that the driver itself will be open source. I could see a future where it doesn't matter if you have an Intel GPU, if you have an AMD GPU, if you got an NVIDIA GPU, you could be in your desktop environment, like say Gnome Shell, where they have those new power modes, those three different power modes. And I could see a future where when you choose a power mode, it has actual input over how your GPU behaves, the whole stack. Like, I think that future is nigh.

Yeah, but if people don't have to write weird UDEV rules, how will they ever learn? Yeah, and it does probably kill a whole generation of bash scripters. Back in my day, Wes. Back in my day. Marcel wrote in with 1234sats. Thanks for the level-headed coverage on the NVIDIA stuff. Most things I see online are extremely entitled. Wow. Yeah, I know.

I think if we were hostile to NVIDIA's first major foray into open source, they won't be likely to go further. We should thank them, not dismiss the whole thing because they didn't open source the firmware. I guess I, too, was a little surprised at first that we went so quickly to, oh, well, this doesn't matter because the firmware. But then I realized, no, I think people are a little jaded. They've heard promises and commitments before. They've seen things specifically heard promises and commitments before. They've seen things specifically around GPU driver promises before. And I think there is just some skepticism that's built up over the years around that. And so then I kind of understood it. I, however, remain very optimistic about this entire thing. I think the evolution of more of these controls

being baked into the firmware has been in the works for years. I don't think NVIDIA did anything new or different here. I don't know if I love it, but I love the idea of at least everything on my machine being open source and free software. Yeah, I mean, maybe it cements us forever in this world of big old binary blobs, but we work, unfortunately, kind of there already. Yeah, that might be true. And at least they're going to work well, right? unfortunately kind of there already. Yeah, that might be true. And at least they're going to work well, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I suppose that could be true. I don't know how I feel about that. You know, I feel like that's a topic, a firmware topic, is something I'd like to talk to more people about that work in the industry and maybe get a more nuanced take on it because that does feel like a pretty complicated issue. We did get a double boost from the Golden Dragon.

Two this week. Double boosting today. Conversation on Tailscale makes me want to swap from zero tier over to this. I don't think as many people knew about Tailscale as I thought. Which is great. I use the crap out of it. I think it's a fantastic, fantastic service. I tell you what.

I was using Tailscale on this trip even, for sure. B-O-O-S-T. We did get some thank you boosts. 1,263 sats total from Kaspiland and Robert Hand, who just wanted to say thank you or streaming in sats while we were doing the show. If you'd like to send a boost into the show and support independent content on a totally free and open network with no middleman. You can go to newpodcastapps.com and grab one of those and then you just load up that

lightning wallet and send them in. And good news, the sats are cheap right now. Sats are going to be on sale this summer. Same old sats, just now on sale. Now, there's no official pick this week. We wouldn't have any backup picks, would we? Yeah, I got one right here in my back pocket. You got a sneaky pick?

Mm-hmm. And it's one I'm surprised hasn't come up before. Okay, so here I am on my flight, right? Getting ready to go on vacation, sitting next to my traveling buddy. And then it turns out that a family kind of got separated. They'd like to sit together. No big deal. I'm happy to make that move. But we were kind of planning to plan a couple projects together you know we're gonna use the plane time to wear it out man so we thought well it'd be nice to at least still be able to to chat with each other there's got to be a way to do that on android right in comes the pick briar secure messaging anywhere and this was like a really handy little app of course it's on f droid but um as they but as they note here, it's back on the Google Play Store again. So it was super easy to get, even just while like last minute waiting for pushback on the plane, right? And it's really

neat. Like we could just, you know, before we separated, we could scan a QR code to get ourselves authenticated with each other. And you can do that either totally offline or you can do it, you know, if it has a mode for doing that, if you happen to be next to each other as well. And then after that, we could do it either with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth right on the plane. It'll do a peer-to-peer Bluetooth network? Yeah. Really? And it just pretty much just worked. That is cool. So you didn't even need a Wi-Fi connection to chat? No. Now, you know, that'll be limited, of course, by the strength of your Bluetooth and such. But I was impressed. Like, I don't know how super feature rich it was, but I was in a pinch and in a pinch it was there for me.

So maybe worth a shot if you're in that kind of offline situation. It's called Briar. Briar. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. The show notes can be found at linuxunplugged.com slash 459 or generally in your podcast app of choice as well. Of course, you can just scroll down and find them there but i like i like to tell you about the website because that's where you go to get things like our mumble server info that's where you go to get the contact page our rss feeds and of course any of our previous episodes so i do like to mention you can go to linuxunplugged.com

slash four five nine for that info and don't miss linux action news there's always something in there going on every single week in the world of free software open source and linux so westpain and i break it down for you it's like a companion show that's right uh lean mean just what you need to know we don't waste your time there's none of this tomfoolery that you have on love that's right none of that tomfoolery see you next week, same bad time, same bad station And of course I'd love to have you join us live on a Sunday We do it noon Pacific, 3pm Eastern over at jblive.tv You never know what we got cooking up

There's usually a lot more show You can become a member, support this production Give us the runway to make choices with the sponsors we want to work with And as a thank you, we got two feeds Ad-free and of, the full live stream. And don't worry, that ad-free feed's not going away. I make one comment one time. You scared people. I did. No, we make both feeds available as a thank you for supporting unpluggedcore.com if you want to become a member. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of The Unplugged Program, and we'll see you right back here next

week. you know chris office hours uh is that coming up on Tuesday? This here Tuesday? Oh, geez, Brent. What? What? What? I was just thinking about your hair, and I thought. Oh, yeah.

I better get in. I better take a shower, huh? No, no, no. I mean, if you got it in the URL, you got to make sure it's, like, fake, you know? I need CG hair. I know. Yeah, I didn't pick the dot hair as a, as like, it's just, it was like that or, I can't remember. It was something else really.

Oh, limo. No, limo. It was like my, because I didn't want to spend a lot of money. And office hours is a really common term. Horrible name. Worst podcast name ever, actually. And I didn't want to spend money on the domain because you know i mean this is just a thing i'm doing so i like how norm normally

you're like you know a new podcast it's a new relationship and you got to take it seriously it's a marriage and then this was sort of like this was a fling thursday afternoon yeah yeah this this is this is the podcast that when i'm traveling to a particular town that I visit often, I call it. Does it even know you're doing this show?