yoctofetch

Blazingly fast, ultra-lightweight system fetch tool.

Synopsis

Handcrafted on top of the Linux™ UAPI, independent of any libc, yoctofetch is a very fast and tiny system fetch tool. It currently has a stripped weight of about 20kb and runs in ~200μs (yes, microseconds).

Despite its incredible performance, it still supports quite a few features:

• Logos (currently only Guix and Arch—more to come)
• The majority of common system information
• Customization via a configuration file
  • Disable output of specific system information
• NO_COLOR support
• Even man pages are included!

Supported platforms

Due to the freestanding C environment, the number of supported platforms is quite limited.

Currently the following are supported:

• Linux ABI
  • x86_64
  • aarch64

Linux on arm (32bit) support might be added. It would also be nice to include the *BSDs, but they make it rather hard to write freestanding programs.

Installation

It can easily be installed on Guix with the following channel configuration:

      (channel
        (name 'yoctofetch)
        (url "https://codeberg.org/Phosphenius/yoctofetch.git")
        (branch "main")
        (introduction
          (make-channel-introduction
            "259077c4909205af495edd5b5dded5b1173f0217"
            (openpgp-fingerprint
              "E504 167C B345 F93E 11AE  341C 1CDA 78BC 7F6C F294"))))

The Arch Linux AUR offers a stable and a git variant:

• yoctofetch
• yoctofetch-git

Building from source is straightforward:

# git clone and cd to checkout
./configure
make

# optionally install
sudo make install

Customization

The configuration file (usually ~/.config/yoctofetch/yoctofetch.conf) can be used to en- or disable all available output options, given that configuration file support is enabled, which is the default, but can be changed via ./configure --disable-config-file when building for some extra performance.

Per default, all options are enabled—even if there is no configuration file (support).

Performance

The actual performance depends on multiple factors, such as how yoctofetch was built and the layout of the files on the system.

Build configuration

The recommended configuration for maximum performance is something like:

./configure CC=gcc  CFLAGS="-march=x86-64-v3 -O2 -flto" LDFLAGS="-Wl,--strip-all" --disable-config-file

At this point, it is uncertain if there is any benefit to -flto. One has to experiment with the flags a bit. On my system, this yields a binary 19K in size which runs in < 230µs.

Also, -march=x86_64-v3 will not work on older CPUs and might have to be replaced with -march=native or similar.

File layout

yoctofetch expects the data in files to be in a certain order or layout and can read them faster if the layout matches the expectations.

For the configuration file, this is usually under the control of the user and it is therefor recommended to keep the values in the configuration file in their default order.

This does not work for system files like /etc/os-release though. So performance will vary, even on the same hardware if a different Linux™ distro is installed.

Benchmarks

Run with hyperfine on a laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 5825U CPU.

Fetch	Mean (µs)	Min (μs)	Max (μs)	Relative
yoctofetch	217.6 ± 37.7	164.5	678.2	1
microfetch	884.4 ± 85.8	645.3	1431.9	4.06 ± 0.81
macchina	3100 ± 300	2600	4800	14.19 ± 2.77
uwufetch	16800 ± 600	16100	20200	77.42 ± 13.75
fastfetch	33400 ± 1500	30200	37400	153.71 ± 27.48
pfetch	89100 ± 2800	84500	96400	409.27 ± 72.11
ufetch	101200 ± 3700	98200	114500	464.91 ± 82.37
screenfetch	243900 ± 3100	24000	25000	1120.85 ± 194.94
neofetch	288200 ± 13800	270200	309100	1324.64 ± 238.35

Licensing

All code is provided under the terms of the GPL-3.0-or-later license.