dynamic /bin /sbin

Richard Coleman richardcoleman at mindspring.com
Fri Jul 25 12:05:43 PDT 2003


Garance A Drosihn wrote:

So give me some good reasons not to stay static?


I believe that freebsd-current is going to dynamic versions
mainly so some dynamically-loaded options (such as pam) could
be made to work correctly.
It has added /rescue (similar to NetBSD's), which has a few
key programs that would be useful in a disk-disaster situation.
We're still in the middle of arguing over just how minimal that
collection should be.  On my 5.x-current system, that /rescue
is 3.7 meg.  On the same system, /bin and /sbin are still
statically-linked.  At the moment, the statically-linked /bin
is 8 meg and /sbin is 26 meg.
You also have to link statically if you want nsswitch.conf to work 
correctly for programs in /bin and /sbin.  For those who remember their 
history, that was the reason that Sun switched their versions of these 
directories to dynamic many years ago.

Switching to dynamic and adding /rescue makes good sense.

Richard Coleman






More information about the Kernel mailing list