I noticed a number of benchmarks failing to run on Ubuntu 25.10 this week with reported checksum errors on the files… I quickly realized it’s due to the recent Rust Coreutils transition for Ubuntu 25.10 causing some major breakage for those relying on Makeself archives.
Beyond Ubuntu developers dealing with some performance regressions due to moving to Rust Coreutils from GNU Coreutils in Ubuntu 25.10, some subtle differences in Rust Coreutils are also causing functionality regression in Ubuntu 25.10.
This week when working on some new Ubuntu 25.10 benchmarks I was surprised to find some MD5 checksum errors being hit.
Such as when running the Unigine benchmarks, their built-in MD5 detection was now failing.
Or with the GravityMark benchmark also now having an MD5 error. This was initially quite surprising since all of my benchmark files are cached locally on a LAN server and all checksummed as well. So the same exact files that I always use for these benchmarks were being run and they have always run fine on other Linux distributions without ever hitting any MD5 errors…
The common denominator to these benchmarks and others having similar MD5 errors now were that they are Makeself archives for these generic Linux executables. And in turn these Makeself archives are running the md5sum command.
With being well aware of the recent Rust Coreutils transition, I decided to replace Rust Coreutils with the GNU Coreutils package (coreutils-from-gnu) still present in the Ubuntu 25.10 archive.
Sure enough, once replacing Rust Coreutils with GNU Coreutils on Ubuntu 25.10, the same exact files now ran successfully without MD5 errors. Looks like some subtle differences between md5sum from GNU Coreutils and Rust Coreutils is breaking files from at least Makeself.
Once confirming that Rust Coreutils was the culprit and searching Ubuntu’s Launchpad, there are indeed other bug reports beginning to appear of other Makeself files such as from VirtualBox also now failing on Ubuntu 25.10.
Some unfortunate breakage with Ubuntu 25.10 due for release in less than two weeks. All of this Makeself breakage was confirmed myself with the latest Ubuntu 25.10 daily state as of today. We’ll see if this Rust Coreutils can be resolved in time for launch day to avoid the common Makeself files from breaking on Ubuntu 25.10 plus any other scripts that may be relying on GNU Coreutils’ md5sum behavior.
