Canonical Looking At Including Performance Tools In Ubuntu 24.04 By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Looking At Including Performance Tools In Ubuntu 24.04 By Default

A proposal has been laid out by Canonical engineers to include various performance tooling in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by default to help in those trying to squeeze out greater performance gains out of their hardware/software and/or debugging/profiling issues. The proposal wants to "make Ubuntu absolutely great for performance engineers" but would mean somewhat significant size increases to the Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-24.04-Perf-Tools-Propose

[polarathene]

Seems like a better use-case to offer as an install time option that can pull the packages remotely? Doesn't make much sense to bundle them for an offline install?

If their installer can't support that, they could probably have a lighter weight option that handles it post-install?

[muncrief]

I don't run Ubuntu but this certainly doesn't make any sense to me. Though I understand it's used on some servers, and they have a separate Ubuntu Server spin for that, most people run desktop Ubuntu because it's one of the the easiest distros to install and anyone who supports Linux provides .deb packages for it. I guess it doesn't really hurt as the increase in install size isn't that much, I just don't understand the point of it. If you're a professional you could install any of these packages in a few minutes, and would probably be running Ubuntu Server anyway. But hey, this is Canonical, and their decisions are often quite mystifying.

[DarkFoss]

Add a check mark option for rocm install as well while your at it.

[andyprough]

Michael Larabel being concerned about an extra 120mb for the download and an extra half GB on the install has got to be one of the most amusing things I've seen this year. I can't recall a bloated pig of a package he hasn't fallen in love with. I guess the fact that it's coming from Canonical and not from the beloved IBM is probably the bigger issue.

[sarmad]

Michael Larabel being concerned about an extra 120mb for the download and an extra half GB on the install has got to be one of the most amusing things I've seen this year. I can't recall a bloated pig of a package he hasn't fallen in love with. I guess the fact that it's coming from Canonical and not from the beloved IBM is probably the bigger issue.

Stop the conspiracy theory. He's right about this one. I've been using Ubuntu for almost 10 years now and I've never even heard of these packages before. The user base for these tools is really limited, so why would you force everyone to install those packages by default? This is also going opposite to Ubuntu's current direction of making the default install even lighter. We even have the option now to install Ubuntu without LibreOffice, which has a far bigger user base than these performance tools.

I guess the best option is what polarathene suggested; just give the user the option to install them as part of the onboarding flow after installation.

[woddy]

I admit I'm surprised, many people don't like profiling and the benefits for desktop users are small. So... why?

[andyprough]

Stop the conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy? Wait what? Where? I didn't say 9/11 was an inside job. I just stated the fact that Michael likes big bloated GNU/Linux packages, especially if they originate from anyone associated with IBM. Or that leaves their job with IBM and takes a job with Microsoft. Nothing controversial about that.

[pong]

Sounds like a nice plan. Certainly I usually have to go looking for / install profiling / performance analysis stuff often enough.
There's so much "kitchen sink" stuff typically bundled in linux desktop distros that not having mainstream or "best in class" available tools at least a couple of them immediately / prominently available in FOSS distros seems like a lost opportunity. Not all that much LINUX SW is that "discoverable" (i.e. needle in a haystack of 5000 optional packages in the repo with terse or actually uninformative descriptions / titles). So to make some good perf. stuff easier to find / discover / use is a good thing.

The other way this sort of thing might come in handy is having better tool / UI / daemon / monitoring subsystem / whatever automation (than is presently done) to proactively track system performance / health / load / responsiveness and be able to paint a better picture as to what's consuming CPU / memory / kernel / I/O or whatever resources, why the system has become laggy in some respect or another, etc. Sure "top" / "htop" / "atop" sometimes leads to a problem obvious even to the nearly blind (99% CPU / memory utilization, swapping, ...) but often it seems more subtle and unclear. Better perf / eBPF / whatever else analytics & monitoring tools could really help.

[timor]

They should make it smaller, not the opposite.