Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 09:34:59 -0700 From: "Sam Leffler" <sam@errno.com> To: "Mike Makonnen" <mtm@identd.net>, "Andrew Gallatin" <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> Cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Making a dynamically-linked root Message-ID: <093601c329ee$24fe0b90$52557f42@errno.com> References: <20030603113927.I71313@cvs.imp.ch><16092.35144.948752.554975@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu><20030603115432.EGLB13328.out002.verizon.net@kokeb.ambesa.net><16092.36129.388194.477452@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> <20030603122226.BGPM11703.pop018.verizon.net@kokeb.ambesa.net>
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> I think for _most_ situations, including the boot scripts, the extra added
time
> is negligible. In the boot scripts some of that added time can be
recuperated
> in other ways (look at the patch I post earlier in the thread). But most
> importantly, I think people are forgetting that this is going to be
*optional*.
> If you don't want to use it, don't.
>
> In many ways this boils down to the age-old bikeshed of "do we want to
keep
> moving into the future or stay tied to the past because we don't want to
lose a
> single bit of performance on that old 386 with 8MB ram we have lying
around."
> For those of us who can't get our companies/clients to use FreeBSD because
it
> can't be integrated into their network this feature is fantastic. For
those of
> us who would rather stay with something that works for us and we're happy
with,
> we can chose not to enable it.
Gordon posted boot-time numbers because I prodded him about not committing
the changes until he had a handle on the performance implications. The time
for a system to reach the "login prompt" was one criteria for some companies
I watched go through the same exercise (I also suggested some other tests
for which I haven't seen results). Mind you they were not talking about a
diskless boot to "login:" but rather booting into a GUI environment where a
lot of applications run during startup.
The point, regardless, was that blindly making these changes while we are
still trying to resolve basic system performance issues is not a great idea.
netbsd recently switched to a dynamically-linked root and before committing
to the change they devoted a bunch of effort into improving the performance
of their dll runtime.
Sam
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