Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 00:22:27 +0000 From: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> To: Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org>, dyson@iquest.net Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unfortunate dynamic linking for everything Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.1.20031119000628.03199b18@popserver.sfu.ca> In-Reply-To: <20031118164905.R35009@pooker.samsco.home> References: <200311182307.hAIN7Wpm000717@dyson.jdyson.com> <200311182307.hAIN7Wpm000717@dyson.jdyson.com>
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At 17:06 18/11/2003 -0700, Scott Long wrote: >Our rationale for encouraging Gordon is as follows: > >1. 4.x upgrade path: As we approach 5-STABLE, a lot of users might want > to upgrade from 4-STABLE. Historically in 4.x, the / partition has > been very modest in size. One just simply cannot cram the bloat that > has grown in 5.x into a 4.x partition scheme. Of course there is the > venerable 'dump - clean install - restore' scheme, but we were looking > for something a little more user-friendly. Of course, making / dynamic results in added complication of removing old libraries from /usr/lib, now that some of them have moved to /lib... >3. Binary security updates: there is a lot of interest in providing a > binary update mechanism for doing security updates. Having a dynamic > root means that vulnerable libraries can be updated without having to > update all of the static binaries that might use them. As far as I'm concerned, this is a non-issue. Identifying which static binaries need to be replaced is now a solved problem, replacing them is easy, and if binary patches are used, there is effectively no impact on bandwidth usage either. On the issue of performance, however: I know people have benchmarked fork-bombs, but has anyone done benchmarks with moderate numbers of long-lived, library-intensive, processes? It seems to me that dynamic linking could have caching advantages. Colin Percival
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