Another change proposal filed recently for the Fedora Linux 43 release is to hardlink identical files within /usr by default for RPM-provided files that are 100% identical and can be then deduplicated to help conserve disk space and increase system efficiency.
Fedora already allows selectively to hardlink identical files in RPMs while this change would make it done everywhere by default for RPM-provided files within the /usr directory.
The Fedora 43 change proposal notes:
“As mentioned in the Summary, hardlinking deduplicates the data in rpms and in installations. Backup, copy, and search programs will usually the link information and not process the same inode twice. Thus, by hardlinking files in the packages we make things a bit more efficient. (The impact is small, because rpms generally don’t have large duplicated files.)
Hardlinking of files was previously done in some packages explicitly, but it required adding a BuildRequires line and invoking a script, so it wasn’t done very often. By handling this automatically, we’ll be able to simplify those packages.”
The change proposal still needs to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) to see if they are up for this improvement.
