Some people in this comment section would probably profit from touching some grass and then looking up who actually contributes to the kernel and how the GPL license works.
If you’re concerned about this coming from Meta, you haven’t been paying attention. This is not to excuse Metas responsibility in the enshittification of the internet, but as a hyperscalar they of course have been pushing computing technology for a long time, and many of it openly available. CRAM will probably be upstreamed into Linux and I assume is therefore already licensed under the GPL. Meta Research seems to be operating in a much more open and useful way than the rest of the company.
what i worry about is them having any control over it and thus in position to gain more control over everything that might depend on it should it become widely used.
In the case of CRAM as a part of Linux the ultimate control still lies with Linus Torvalds. Other Meta projects like for example zstd can be forked as soon as they do some fishy stuff with it. But I do agree, when Meta is in the role of maintainer, we should keep a close eye on how the projects develop.
It’s foolish to fall for the false firewall these corporations try to put up between divisions. Meta is meta is meta. Do not think for a moment that they are not the same thing.
It seems like there are even idealistic employees of these places that have deluded themselves into believing that, simply because right at this moment, the person Meta has put in charge of their division isn’t an absolute psychopath, that their positions aren’t extremely unethical.
Did you know that most of the contributions made to the Linux kernel come from people who are being paid to do so?
Corporate developers authored 84.3% of kernel commits in 2025, with contributions distributed across more than 1,780 organizations. Intel maintained its position as the top contributor by changesets, delivering nearly double the volume of second-place Google.
Google demonstrated extensive sign-off activity, accounting for approximately 12.5% of patches. Meta functions as a significant maintainer hub, with 12.5% of patches passing through Meta-affiliated reviewers.
https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-kernel-contributors-lines-of-code-statistics/
Yes, meta is a evil ass company but the fearmongering, that they will take over Linux is just that. Fearmongering. The Linux foundation has been put in charge of the kernel to prevent takeover of the project by corporate members and it has been like that for years.
Cool story.
I feel like most of such work happens despite the company not because of it. True credit goes to the engineers who did it. I feel like meta would have just scraped them for more VR universe or whatever it was called lol
They buy a lot of servers and all that expensive ram is eating into Zuccs orphan crushing machine budget, so something had to be done.
Meta can CRAM this functionality into mark Zuckerbergs ass
ZStandard is also developed by a Facebook. And its truly amazing. What’s wrong with their CRAM development, if everyone benefits from it for free and is Open Source?
I don’t want to have anything to do with facebook, that’s why. It’s fucking charity washing
I might have bad news for you about large parts of the linux kernel.
yes yes, it’s all AI and IBM so it’s made of the same algos that ran the Nazi concentration camps.
I don’t want to RELISH news of them doing more, and I’m not going to kiss their ass because they spent 0.00000000000001% of their earnings on one patch.
You actually don’t, because this is in the Linux Kernel. Fine if you don’t want to, just like I don’t want to have anything to do with Epic Games. But this is a personal and emotional decision, and I do respect this!
However, charity washing? Is this conspiracy of something? I mean they develop an Open Source software, controlled by the standards of Linux. So from security and privacy standpoint there should be no issue. And I don’t see any problem or issue. If someone could explain to me what the problem here is, I might change my opinion (and trust me, I do change my opinion). I just don’t see an issue here.
I pulled a word out my ass because I can’t be bothered with looking it up all the way for this ambiguous term.
Basically, like “sportswashing” they are trying to cover up/compensate for their horrible behaviour by releasing crumbs like this to gain goodwill. I’m not going to change my opinion on facebook being a piece of shit scourge on humanity just because they put some ram efficiencies in linux.
No-one asked you to?
It’s better for a company to do a good thing for the wrong reasons than it is for them to do another wrong thing. I’m not going to change my opinion of Facebook over this, but I also don’t think we should avoid benefiting from one of the few good things they’re doing with their money.
Imagine if they were donating money to the feed the poor, and someone was saying we should burn the money instead of buying food, just because Facebook wasn’t sincere enough.
Well said
Thank you
I feel you man. Its irritating that even these evil fuckers charity is a fucking manipulation. Its the whole world right now. One giant cash grab & scam
Cool, pervert ram, just what everyone asked for
More ram for your ram is just objectively a good thing for computers to have, regardless of the pervert it came from.
Objectivity sounds like a really good thing, until it is just apathy.
As a user of zram, I am excited
Looks good, can’t wait for this to be adopted into fedora.
Nope, never going to use this now. I don’t trust Meta to walk a dog, certainly not with a core os component.
If it is good and open, engineering is engineering. Good engineering came out of Meta before, that all of us use daily, like the zstd compression algorithm.
Save the moral outrage for all the other shady shit Meta imposes on humanity, god knows there is a intercontinental cargo ship load of it to choose from.
If you genuinely realise (and care) that meta is shady, there is no merit in supporting the company.
Moral outrage is something that people with decent morality have. Apathy is something that zombies have.
If you do not want to support Meta, cancel your WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook accounts. Stop being their product.
Participation in free/open source software is something that is encouraged from all, even if they are shady corporations like Meta, Google, Nvidia or Microsoft.
I got bad news for you if you use the modern web
Name a few things, I’m curious.
Ever heard of a tiny little thing called React? GraphQL and relay? Presto? Folly? Zstd? Hack? RocksDB? Btrfs?
PyTorch is crazy big in ML/AI and has been for a while now.
And specifically in Linux: https://engineering.fb.com/2015/10/05/open-source/improving-the-linux-kernel-with-upstream-contributions/
And that’s not even mentioning things that aren’t just their tech, like open compute and funding foss and the Linux foundations, crap ton of open source projects, testing, bug fixes, and miscellaneous contributions… Let alone all the tech that tries to compete with their tech; all the alternatives to react et al that are ‘next gen’
Like it or not, the facebooks and googles of the world have contributed significantly to things you probably interact with every day.
Heard of btrfs, don’t use it. Nor the rest.
0 out of 10.
As to the Linux kernel at this point everyone has contributed something. That would be like being mad at air for having been processed by Zuckerbergs human form cooling unit.
Did you knew that in 2025 84% of contributions to the kernel were authored by companies? That is not “everyone has contributed something”
https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-kernel-contributors-lines-of-code-statistics/
Even I’ve done something, so I’m going to stand by my statement.
Oh, but you do use them! Because the services you interact with use them. Even the ones that don’t, frequently use alternatives that have been influenced by their existence.
This might be a surprise to you, my liege; but the world does not, in fact, revolve around you and your preferences. Shockingly, the world seems to exist wholly independent of your uninformed and shortsighted opinions.
This is like being mad that acetylene welding exists, and saying that it’s pointless because you’ve never personally used it. Obviously if it was good or important, you would have used that technology directly yourself, riiiight? So the world and history would obviously be no different if it had never existed.
0 out of 10.
Now you’re just not arguing in good faith here. You asked for contributions, there they are. I use Btrfs and it’s great. (There’s lots of actually valid reasons to hate meta, let’s focus on those)
The criteria was “that all of us use daily” not “that you’ve heard of”. Scroll up, it’s right there.
You use btrfs, I don’t, therefore the “all of us use” qualification fails, let alone “daily”.
Zstd / ZStandard is pretty good.
A few notable ones?
https://engineering.fb.com/2018/10/30/open-source/linux/
Btrfs
https://itsfoss.com/news/react-foundation-launch/
React
PyTorch (if you’re into the AI thing)
I suspect, without evidence, that you’d probably find some Meta engineers contributing to the Linux kernel to some degree, so you may have to rip that out of your system.
0 for 3, is that it?
I don’t get this comment. You asked for examples, and they gave you.
I asked for examples that I use. I haven’t seen one yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Facebook_software is comprehensive as far as I know. Even if you don’t use React, a lot of developers use it and control the web. So you might wander around the web that is written with React. But its no longer part of Facebook / Meta, so I don’t know if it still counts.
Impressive, building your own kernel without Btrfs. I admit, you’re better than me.
CONFIG_BTRFS_FS=nWow that was almost too difficult. 🙄
But why not? What is the fear here? It’s not like Meta has any control if you install or enable the feature.
Do you not know what that company does?
I know the company. But what is the fear about CRAM? What do you think Facebook / Meta will do to harm you, if you use CRAM? I ask this question honestly, as someone who hates Facebook and does not use any of their services, and never visit their pages. But I use ZStandard developed by Facebook. And I do not see any problem in doing so.
If you can audit the code and it’s clean and you built it yourself then probably nothing would happen. I don’t trust them not to add something to access the memory though and don’t have the time to audit code. Theyre not trustworthy enough to give the benefit of the doubt.
Access… the memory
That’s
That’s what software is
Please don’t ever write anything.
I do not install anything from Facebook. Now talking about ZStandard as en example: Those libraries are part of the tools I use, such as the file compression tools. And even MAME emulator supports this and other applications, to have some fast decompression without long wait times. I even use it for my backups. I don’t know how Facebook could do something in such cases. And for CRAM, this would be integrated into the Kernel with same standards as Linux.
I would understand the concerns if we speak about downloading and installing from Facebook directly. But that is not the case here.
Meta has funded all sorts of open source infrastructure, for a long time. If you want to avoid their funded contributions… TBH, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
Embrace, Extend, Eliminate?
That is not how this works. EEE can be said about window’s wsl, but here they are contributing directly to the kernel. That is why linux is that good, these big corporations profit billions by running linux, and getting it sligthly more memory efficient with current ram prices makes them profit even more. Fortunately the license forces them to contribute the code back and we profit from the same optimizations they implemented.
Fortunately the license forces them to contribute the code back
It doesn’t. It would only compel them to share their changes if they distributed their modified kernel to others, rather than simply running it on their own servers. And even then, they wouldn’t have to contribute their code back upstream.
They chose to contribute their changes upstream anyway, presumably so they aren’t burdened with having to adapt them to every new kernel version in the future. Fortunately, we stand to benefit as a side effect of that decision.
I dislike Meta as much as anyone, but sometimes a cucumber is just a cucumber.
Here is your cucumber:
People who dislike meta don’t promote meta.
I dislike Meta. But I like their work on ZStandard and use it myself. Best compression algorithm since 7zip. It’s extremely fast and can be used in may applications for various use cases. If that is the standard we can expect, then I’m happy what they do on CRAM. We only benefit from this.
You mean like ZStandard from Facebook too?
Let’s hope GPL v2 helps
