Dynamic /bin support on FreeBSD

Dan writes "Gordon Tetlow has put together a patch to have /bin dynamically linked on FreeBSD. This is the first step on the way to having everything play nicely with ongoing work on getting NSS into the system. He cautions that the patch is preliminary and should probably be installed on a test machine."

Comments

Re:hmm talkative bunch around here

[Otter]

The Slashdot writeup:

Gordon Tetlow has put together a patch to have /bin dynamically linked on FreeBSD. This is the first step on the way to having everything play nicely with ongoing work on getting NSS into the system.

The linked writeup:

Gordon Tetlow has put together a patch to have /bin dynamically linked on FreeBSD. This is the first step on the way to having everything play nicely with ongoing work on getting NSS into the system.

The message itself:

I just hacked together support to have /bin dynamically linked. This is the first step on the way to having everything play nicely with nectar's work on getting NSS into the system.

Not much more to add, is there? Except that this is the first step on the way to having everything play nicely with ongoing work on getting NSS into the system.

Why?

[aridhol]

Why do they need to change the established way things work (statically linked in /bin, dynamically linked in /usr/bin) to add a new system? Why not either adapt NSS or install it in /usr?

Re:Why?

[Neil]

NSS (name service switch) provides "on the fly" reconfigurable name services - it is the mechanism that allows (for example) a Solaris or Linux machine to look up password entries in /etc/passwd, the NIS, LDAP, or whatever, depending on the contents of the "passwd:" line of /etc/nsswitch.conf.

NSS works by dynamically loading the correct resolving routines from shared objects at run time. In contrast, a statically linked binary has "hard wired" name service lookup policies, which have been set by whatever library routines were statically linked into the executable.

A system where some of the binaries obey preferences the admin expresses through /etc/nsswitch.conf but, say, /bin/ls doesn't is unlikely to be popular! :-)

Re:Why

[pmz]

Who the hell needs this!?

Some of the comments at the link in the article would suggest new or improved LDAP support. That's pretty significant. NSS stands for Name Service Switch, which allows alternative datasources for many of the databases traditionally stored in /etc.

Solaris, for example, can use local files, DNS, NIS, NIS+, and LDAP for the hosts database. Minus DNS, these datasources can also provide the users database, the RBAC databases, the automounter configuration, bootparams, to name a few. To say it is useful is an understatement.