Fedora Linux 40 Looks To Replace iotop With iotop-c

Fedora Linux already ships an iotop-c package for this C alternative to the common iotop program for reporting I/O metrics under Linux, but with the upcoming Fedora 40 release it's looking at having iotop-c replace the original iotop.

The iotop program has long been around for a top-like I/O monitoring solution for Linux systems. But its latest released version was a decade ago and seldom sees new commits upstream. Meanwhile iotop-c has been maintained for some time, is written in C rather than Python and able to run on small embedded systems, and has various other enhancements over the original iotop.

Fedora / Red Hat developers thus are planning to replace iotop with iotop-c. The iotop-c package will be available as "iotop" as for the binary name with the Fedora packages. The original iotop will in turn be treated as obsolete by Fedora.

More details on this planned change by Fedora Linux for the Fedora 40 release can be found via the Fedora Wiki. This change still needs to be approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but considering the state of iotop-c and the ill-supported iotop upstream, it makes sense.